


a dainty dish to set before the king

by mockturtletale



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Barebacking, Demons, First Time, M/M, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-06 08:21:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1851109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockturtletale/pseuds/mockturtletale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But then the clocks strike midnight - clocks plural - and that’s weird as fuck, because the year is 2013 and Jonathan Toews doesn’t own any clocks that make that noise. He doesn’t own any clocks that make noise period.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a dainty dish to set before the king

**Author's Note:**

> Written to take place a little before now, and right now, and a little bit in the future. This is demon fic, so there's a considerable age difference between Jonny and Patrick, and some elements of their feelings for one another are a little off kilter in some regards.
> 
> Everyone is a consenting adult (according to the laws of our universe at least) and no one is coerced or encouraged to act in ways that they do not want to act, but this is not the healthiest of relationship dynamics and it probably borders on mutual obsession at points.
> 
> Maybe they were just born weirdos, maybe it's destiny, etc.
> 
> Originally intended to be one of several stories I had planned for the home_ice Halloween challenge, this instead became a 24k beasty that I wrote over the course of a week during which I had only one day off work. Such is the power of Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews' unnatural love. Abandon hope (and sleep) all ye who enter here and whatnot. I owe monstrously huge thanks to my beta and friend, Danielle, who not only gives me her time and attention when I ask for it (unless there's an NFL game happening at the same time) but makes me feel both safe in and proud of this story and everything else she works with me on. This story wouldn't be this story without her.
> 
> As usual, this is for mo chailin dileas; liketheroad. Because true friendship means never letting your friends escape a single month unscathed by your words, and nothing says 'I love and adore you' like emotional devastation. ♥

**“There are some things that I know for certain: always throw spilt salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck, and fall in love whenever you can,”** \- Sally Owens in Practical Magic. 

 

-

 

When Halloween rolls around, Jonny is expecting some weird and terrible shit to go down. Because it’s Halloween. That’s the name of the fucking game. 

But he’s also a firm believer that the weirdest, worst kinds of awful nonsense are quite rightly reserved for those who willingly wade into the belly of the beast, and that’s why this Halloween finds Jonathan Toews right where every Halloween has found him these last few years, since things started to stray so far beyond what Jonny wants and can deal with on a night out: at home. 

The notable difference is that this year he isn’t alone. 

“Quit your fucking bitching, man, all you were gonna do is brood in the dark and watch scary movies anyways. It’s not like you’re even scared of shit that isn’t blown calls or not being the best dressed player in the NHL or whatever, so sack up and pass the popcorn, douchebag.” 

“Shoulda brought your own when you decided to crash my place, asshole,” Jonny continues to bitch, and not without vehemence, but he passes Patrick the bowl anyway because he’s not actually upset at the company. He just doesn’t like surprises. Not tonight. He fucking hates Halloween. 

So it’s whatever. It’s not a big deal that Patrick showed up without calling. They might as well spend Halloween together the same way they spend most nights together - volleying between comfortable silence and cutting, cruel commentary that they deliver in equal and equally admonishingly measure for the lives and choices of the fictional people they find on television and the person they’re sitting next to in their apartments. Patrick isn’t the worst company, and nothing weird can happen in Jonny’s own place, so this is infinitely preferable to anything that’s happening outside these four walls, unexpected guests or no. 

But then the clocks strike midnight - clocks plural - and that’s weird as fuck, because the year is 2013 and Jonathan Toews doesn’t own any clocks that make that noise. He doesn’t own any clocks that make noise period. 

“What the fuu-” Jonny starts to say, but when he turns to look at Patrick for confirmation that he just heard that too, he ends up jerking away from him instead, not sure whether it’s the impact of hitting the arm of the couch so hard that knocks the breath out of his lungs, or the shock. 

“Patrick. Patrick?” 

Jonny doesn’t know if he’s terrified for Patrick or terrified _of_ him, but Patrick just blinks at him and tilts his head to one side sharply; unnaturally smooth and precise. He holds his own hands up in front of his face, blinks once more, and starts to laugh. 

“Well, shit.” 

 

____

 

**if I told you a secret you won’t tell a soul,  
(will you hold it and keep it alive.)**

 

“So you’re a demon, is what you’re telling me.” 

Patrick rolls his eyes and Jonny gulps, because jesus christ. The Patrick Jonny is looking at right now is still his Patrick, but not really. Not exactly. He’s way fucking hotter, for example. His skin has always been kind of terrible in winter, the cold weather leeching all the colour from his face and making him look sickly, always tired unless he was sweating and flushed; red in a way that could hardly ever be considered attractive. Now he looks like something out of a museum. Someone chiselled from fucking marble. His jawline is sharper; his skin like porcelain but warm looking, somehow - welcoming. His cheekbones look like they could cut glass. His mouth is fuller, blood red and _ample_ , and Jonny has to look away from him, because it’s like everything Patrick was before has come into sharper, better focus and Jonny doesn’t care what the fuck he is, he can’t have him sitting in his apartment looking like that. 

“Not exactly, but that’s probably the closest term you have for it.” 

“Are you … you’re not going to like … kill me, or try to eat any of my body parts or anything, right?” 

It’s a question Patrick doesn’t even deem deserving of an answer, apparently, because instead of a reply what Jonny gets is Patrick relaxing back into his couch, casually lifting his arms to rest up along the back of it, his right hand almost touching Jonny. He spreads his knees a little further apart, stretching out and making _room_ , and Jonny would rather he just got on with eating him, honestly. It would be kinder. 

“Are you a sex demon? Are you like … a succubus, that’s what they’re called? Are you a dude one of those?” Jonny knows it’s a hail mary, but he still prays he doesn’t sound hopeful. Mostly his voice sounds panicked; high with the alarm that he’s racing toward, but there are hints of betrayal there too, tinged with suspicion because it would be just fucking like Patrick to be a sex demon. Jonny’s always known he was some kind of bad news, but he’d never thought to worry that maybe Patrick might turn out to be the good kind of bad news - irresistible and so, so dangerous. Demonic to boot. 

Patrick chuckles, and the sound tinkles through the room, falls from his mouth in little fractures of sound that dance out into the shadows they’re suddenly sitting in because Jonny hadn’t noticed, but the lights have dimmed. It’s like they’re bathed in candlelight, but there are no candles. Every sound Patrick makes has a taste and Jonny’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, thick and dry with need. 

“No. Not a sex demon. If you must know all the gory details, I do feed off human emotion. Heartbreak, specifically. But what I do doesn’t kill anyone,” Patrick tilts his head again, and Jonny can feel his pulse in his toes, “Not that I know of, at least.” He says it like he doesn’t much care either way, and now that he’s had a moment or five to get past the shock of Patrick’s appearance, Jonn is starting to see the other differences. 

Patrick’s speech is different, now. Again - more polished. His voice and tone are smoother, but his word choice is stiffer, stuffier. He’s talking about all of this like it’s boring him. Like it’s old news. So old it won’t be found in any archives. 

“Patrick … is that even your name? How old are you?” 

Jonny gets the distinct impression that he’s boring Patrick, and he still doesn’t know exactly what Patrick is or how this works, but he’s pretty sure he gets to ask these questions, he’s almost entirely confident that he’s the one who has exclusively reserved the right to be in charge about this. Patrick might be an ancient sex demon, but Jonny is still his captain and that fucking stands for something. 

“Patrick is the modern version of my name, yes. And I’m old. Older than old. Even I’ve forgotten the exact number, but it’s irrelevant.” 

“What about your family? Who are they really? Are they … are they just some poor human chumps you like whammied into thinking you’re theirs? Is that how this works for you? What the rest of us are to you? Do you have any real family?” 

Jonny is starting to sweat. He’s starting to panic. 

“Oh relax, Jonathan. They are my real family. In a sense. We’re not family the way you think of it, but none of us come from a time or place that has that. We’re all different, but we’ve all been together for hundreds of years, so we’re as close as you see us to be. There’s nothing faked in that.” 

“Fucking _how_ ,” Jonny asks, faintly, because his head is swimming now that he’s started to really think about this. “How does no one know? Are they demons like you? Are any of them good? Holy shit, have you been playing hockey for hundreds of years? Are you a fucking cheater? Is that what you’re telling me?” Strangely, the thought settles Jonny as much as it riles him up further. 

“So predictable,” Patrick murmurs, shaking his head and dropping his hand to trail a finger up the length of Jonny’s forearm, following the dip of his muscle and watching his own progress, tracking the movement like he’s thinking about how Jonny’s body works, imagining the mechanics. 

Ever since the clocks struck midnight he’s been watching Jonny in this idly considering way, like he’s prey, like he’s something to be toyed with. Something Patrick might want to toy with, if offered the right kind of incentive. Jonny shivers at his touch, but he doesn’t pull away. 

“I only picked up hockey about five years before I met you. I hadn’t played before then, but I was bored and it looked like something to do. My family, as you call them, were bored and I was bored of them, so we moved here and I did the Juniors thing. Not only am I not a cheater, but I’ve actually been playing for way less years than you have, so I guess I’m just gifted. Unnaturally so, you could say,” Patrick drawls, the words dragging their way out of his throat slow and repeated, like they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again and again, no matter how disinterested in their repetition Patrick seems to be. 

Jonny cannot believe what he’s hearing. Patrick is a sex demon, his family are nothing more than an ancient evil support group, and Patrick has only been playing hockey for ten years. No way. No fucking way. This is bullshit. 

“Bullshit, Kaner. I’ve seen the pictures, I’ve seen the fucking footage. You were a kid in juniors, you weren’t like -” Jonny tries to wave a hand dismissively at Patrick’s body, he truly does, but it maybe comes off a little more like a jazz hand instead. It’s embarrassing. Jonny slaps his other hand over it, as if that does anything to cover the way he’s well and truly losing it. “I’ve seen pictures of you as a toddler, okay? How do you explain that one, eh?” 

Patrick doesn’t quite roll his eyes this time, but he raises his eyebrows just slightly, lets his left dimple set a little deeper. 

“So unimaginative, Jonny. You have to realize that your world is built around about 5% of the possibilities that truly exist, the reality that you’re living in and around without ever really seeing. For someone so capable, you let what you think you can and can’t believe in limit you to … this.” Patrick’s gesture is definitely dismissive, and Jonny is embarrassed all over again, but pissed off too, now. “When I first met you I thought maybe - but no, you’re as human as they come, aren’t you? It’s sweet. So sweet it’s sick, really.” 

Now Jonny is pissed off, embarrassed, offended and almost flattered all at once. Fucking Kaner. Always coming up with new ways to ruin Jonny’s life, because pranks aren’t enough, simple escapades aren’t nearly good enough for Patrick Kane. He’s got to be inhuman. He’s got to be a world apart from everyone else, in ways Jonny couldn’t even have imagined. 

“Nice try, but I didn’t miss you dodging the question.” 

“Ugh. This is so tedious. Come now, pay attention. Patrick Senior is a man of the fates, he manipulates the course of lives, the circumstances set out before us. Not ‘us’ as in you and I specifically, ‘us’ as in anyone he feels like controlling. I haven’t needed his help in quite some time. The one I call mom is an annalist, she tracks and records and sometimes rewrites history. She has come in handy, of late. Erica is something like the succubus you think me to be, but it’s not at all like it’s sensationalized in your modern media. She feeds off of the energy of those she mates with, but she doesn’t need to do so very often. She’s been bored by the fashion trends this last while, so she’s done the college thing for about fifty years now. Jacqueline is a trickster, and that’s why she’s my favourite. Those pictures and the footage you’ve seen are probably remarkably similar to what I looked like back before I can remember, but she can manipulate almost anything simple or recent, imagery or records or accounts. Jessica plays the emotions of human beings like I stickhandle a puck. She can make you think or feel anything she wants you to think or feel, act on anything she wants you to believe you feel. That’s why you think she’s your favourite,” Patrick finishes, almost apologetically. Pityingly, maybe, if Jonny is honest with himself. 

Jonny has always been very good at being very honest about some things, so much so that neither he nor anyone else notices how dishonest he’s being about other things. 

“So this entire time … everything about you, everything I think I know about you, everything we’ve accomplished together … all of that has been a lie.” Jonny doesn’t look at Patrick, doesn’t raise his voice or stand up and storm off. He sits perfectly still and barely breathes, and says what he finds easiest to say. Easiest does not mean easy. Easiest hardly means bearable, in this case. 

The pad of Patrick’s index finger is warm and soft, gentle on Jonny’s face when he tilts Jonny’s chin up and takes the choice to make eye contact out of Jonny’s hands. Maybe he’d been expecting Patrick’s touch to be chilly, to bring goosebumps to his skin now, but he doesn’t know why. He’d have been wrong, anyway. He doesn’t shiver until their eyes meet, and he forces his shoulders to stay still with his teeth gritted in effort, but Patrick smiles nonetheless.

“No. No.” Patrick’s eyes are more intense than Jonny has ever seen them - ever seen anyone’s. Jonny feels like Patrick is looking inside him, seeing right into the heart of everything he is, everything he’s thinking and feeling, and not just seeing the reality of that, but seeing it in some way that Jonny can’t, making sense of it in ways that are beyond him and his human capabilities, which feel like limitations, now. Patrick looks at him like he knows him through his bones, and this is hardly the first time, but Jonny never had real reason to wonder about the validity of that suspicion before now. “Everything else, maybe. Everything that came before, and everything you had to think had come before. But our time together can’t be changed by anything I did or didn’t do before it. We’re true. This is happening. What we are is real.” 

It’s a delivery that Jonny finds incongruous with everything else Patrick has said or projected since this version - the actual version of him - had been revealed at midnight. He sounds sincere. He seems invested in making Jonny believe him. He says it like it matters to him that Jonny listens. He says it like Jonny not only matters, but matters to him when so little seems to. 

Jonny can’t wonder about that now. He looks away and takes his chin out of Patrick’s hand by jerking his head out of reach, not yet ready to do anything that means touching Patrick, even if it’s only to pull himself out of his grasp. Jonny keeps his gaze trained straight ahead, because if he lets Patrick keep their eyes locked on one another, keep his hands on Jonny’s body in any small way at all, he knows he won’t be able to do what needs to be done now. 

“So what happens next? You play hockey with me until you get bored and then you move on to someo- -- something else? You stick around until you get found out and chased out of town or whatever, and then you bail? You have your sister-like-demon clean up after you, and no one is any the wiser? Will I know who you are next month? In ten years time will I remember you were ever here? How far does this go, Patrick? How much are you prepared to take from me?” Jonny wants to twist to face Patrick fully. He wants to force himself to look at him while they have this conversation, and more than that he wants to know that Patrick won’t be able to look away either. He wants to know that this is important to Patrick. He needs to know not just that he matters, but that _they_ matter. But he can’t do it. He can’t go out on that limb, because it gets shorter and shakier with every passing second, every new and awful detail this night reveals. 

Jonny can’t look at Patrick because he’s terrified that if he looks into his eyes or lets his face into his line of sight, he’ll do so through distance. He’ll register the space between them, the distance that Patrick is telling him has always, always been there, and in the gap that stands between them as they sit side by side on Jonny’s couch, he’ll find himself gutted. He’ll see the mess Patrick has made of him, the pieces that he has pulled him to. 

When Patrick reaches for Jonny’s hand Jonny doesn’t move it away. He doesn’t move at all. Patrick’s touch still warms him, more now than it did before, and Jonny hates that that might be all in his head. He hates whatever part of his hopeless inclination toward Patrick and everything Patrick is, everything Patrick does, thrills at knowing Patrick better now, knowing him more even if that means knowing he has known him less than he wanted to think. He steels himself against the way his heart leaps for his throat through this conversation, feverishly excited at the chance to be closer to Patrick, to get close. 

“I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d stay. With you, I mean. Until … Well, until it’s time to move on again. I’ve grown so fond of hockey, I think I’d like to keep playing, after. But I want to stay here while I can. I’ve never stayed put for so long before, I’ve never been able to. I think I’d like to see this one through. As far as I can. All the way, with you.” Patrick’s sentences are clipped. Short, concise, simple strings of words that cut through Jonny like wire. Not because they are short, but because they are delivered in fits and starts, with pauses and in spurts. Patrick is unsure, and it’s Jonny and their potential future that makes him feel that way. 

The light in the room flickers, and Jonny still doesn’t know where it’s coming from, hasn’t had the cognitive capacity to question something as insignificant as that when Patrick is sitting next to him telling him that nothing he thinks he knows is true; nothing will ever be the same again. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to be relieved to hear that Patrick wants to stick around. He doesn’t know if Patrick’s expecting him to be fucking flattered to hear that he has somehow managed to pique some kind of interest in Patrick. But all Jonny feels is a cold, biting kind of anger. A twist of emotion that settles into his chest like jagged, rusted teeth at the thought of Patrick playing hockey when Jonny can’t, when Jonny is old and useless or dead and gone, because that’s what Patrick means when he says ‘after.’ Jonny doesn’t want that. Jonny doesn’t want any part of that. Maybe Patrick could be happy to have Jonny entertain him until he can’t anymore, but Jonny won’t let Patrick see him like that. 

“What makes you think you can stay? What makes this time different?” 

Patrick tilts his head at him again, and Jonny only sees the movement out of the corner of his eye, but he knows what it looks like, now, he knows what it means. He hates the parts of who he is that sear him with pride for the ability to surprise Patrick, still. 

The way Patrick settles next to him before he answers is something Jonny can see and hear and feel. Now that everything is out in the open, he’s letting Jonny see him for how he really is; just how still he can be. Jonny wants to watch him shake. He wants to feel him quiver. It terrifies him to think about what he wouldn’t give to be the one to make Patrick lose the control that is so clear through his body now, in his almost totally measured speech, the way he holds himself like it’s not only easy to be so fixed, so static next to Jonny, but natural. His version of a natural state, at least. Jonny can’t think about what he wouldn’t give to be Patrick’s undoing because there is _nothing_.

“Well, I blow through places pretty steadily. Quickly. I’m something of a glutton, if I’m honest, and maybe if I reined it in or paced myself I could stay awhile in a place or two, but I’ve never wanted to slow down. I won’t. Whole cities pulsing with broken, balefully beating hearts can’t keep me satisfied for long. I fill my belly with a town or two, gorge myself on a capital, repeat the cycle until I need more. And I always get it, which is what I used to find most charming about your wretched, messy kind. Before you, of course. You changed all that, didn’t you?” Patrick talks to Jonny like he’s a pet. Like he’s something to be praised in only the most pitying, patronizing, mock-sympathetic, supercilious of ways. It still makes Jonny want to show Patrick his throat. It still makes Jonny want to ask for more. It makes him want to _beg_. 

“What -- what do you mean? What do I have to do with any of this? You’re here because of hockey. You’re here because you found something that actually caught hold of your non existent attention span. That doesn’t change just because you’ve been like this for hundreds of years longer than I’d thought. That hasn’t changed because of me.” 

Patrick’s smile is soft. And pouted. And mocking. And cruel. 

“Oh, sweetness. Everything has changed because of you.” The pad of his thumb is gentle on the palm of Jonny’s hand, tracing slow circles across the heel of it, but his fingers banded around Jonny’s wrist are tight enough to kiss bruises into Jonny’s skin. Jonny doesn’t know which kind of touch he likes more. “I’ve been full since the day I met you. For years now I’ve stayed fat and sated with every tiny little crack that rots through the heart of you. Your heart breaks over and over, and I get dizzy with it sometimes, you hurt so keenly, so _well_. Every single day you ache so nicely, and I haven’t needed anyone else’s pain for a very long time, now. You see, yours is a different kind of heartbreak entirely.”

The burn of Jonny’s lungs with his breath caught up in knots, in panicked tangles, is nothing next to the heavy dread that drops through the pit of his stomach, the afterthought pinprick of heartbeats that come faster but lighter, faint and fearful stings stitched through with threat. Patrick shushes him and it’s soft but not kind, pushed tight past what sounds like a smile, to Jonny. 

“Feeding from others gives me what I need, but you give me just what I want, don’t you? Because with all the minutes and hours and weeks and months and years that pass, you realize and keep realizing that you’ll never have me. You could fight as hard as you fight for everything else, you could wage war until the effort killed you, and still you couldn’t win me. Your heart doesn’t just break to feed me, to give me what I want. It breaks because you want me, and you ache to know you’ll never have what you need. You’ll never have me. I’ve never known anything like it,” Patrick says, his eyes blown wide in awe, but drawn soft in something like wonder, “You poor little thing, your ache is ambrosial. It makes me want to drink you dry.” 

Jonny’s chest gets tight and his eyes sting, prick painfully when the pain pooling in them meets cold air. 

He gulps for a breath and gets nothing. 

What little light had been left around them extinguishes in an instant, and Patrick gasps quietly next to him. 

Jonny reaches blindly for Patrick in the dark, and Patrick is there. 

 

______

 

**I just died in your arms tonight.  
(I keep looking for something I can’t find.)**

 

There’s nothing untrue in what Patrick says, and Jonny has wanted Patrick in his arms this way - honest, without the fear of or respect for boundaries - for years. 

Patrick is warm and willing, eager even, and Jonny wants to argue the point that all he’ll ever be is human because with Patrick’s chest pressed to his and his hands on Patrick’s shoulders, the sides of their faces touched together, Jonny feels like more than that. He listens to Patrick breathe, and he feels the swell of his lungs, feels him exhale, his breath warm and so real that it makes the hair on the back of Jonny’s neck stand up, and Jonny can’t be human, Jonny can’t be anything Patrick isn’t. Patrick’s fingers find the curve of Jonny’s waist, pull his tshirt tight in their grip, and Jonny could kill for him, Jonny could live forever if it meant having _this_. 

“I love you,” Jonny tells Patrick, with his eyes closed but still full, the words shaking out of him into the hot skin of Patrick’s throat, Jonny’s mouth pressed there, pleading. 

“I know,” is Patrick’s reply, thick with something Jonny can’t read until he pulls away and looks at Patrick, really looks at him for the first time since he really saw him, tonight. Patrick blinks slowly, surfacing, and when his eyes finally open they are wide, vast with the pleasure Patrick seems to be trying in vain to shake off. 

Jonny appreciates the effort, he guesses. 

“You should go,” he says, swallowing with effort. Biting down on ten other sentences, very different sentiments that burn up on his tongue before they can become sound. 

There is surprised pride in Patrick’s smile when he agrees and goes. 

 

____

 

**No dawn.  
(No Day.)**

 

Once Patrick leaves, Jonny sits in what has since become total darkness, and he thinks and he shivers. 

He can’t seem to get warm again, once Patrick has taken his body heat away, not even when he climbs into bed having already pulled on a hoody. He wonders if it’s part of Patrick’s nature - his powers, or whatever. He wonders, in dread, if something about tonight and the awful acknowledgement of it means it will all get worse. He feels Patrick’s absence more keenly, and he has no idea if the heightened awareness tonight has brought is because he’s thinking about it differently now, still stuck in the raw new reality of who Patrick is and how that changes what Jonny’s life has meant or could ever mean, or if the knowledge of how things really are will mean that Jonny will always feel it this way. Completely. 

When he falls asleep, eventually, Jonny’s eyes close against images of what he has lost. 

Not Patrick. Not their life together. Not a best friend. Not a teammate that drives him to success. 

The simple ache of loving someone who you know will never love you back. The small consolation that at least Patrick would never know and Jonny would never have to fight off his pity. 

Jonny’s silver linings have rusted away. The victories he could cling to and the wins he could concentrate his pride on are hollowed out now, tarnished and tin after all, after every little ‘at least’ Jonny shored himself up with turned out to be a lie, too. 

Patrick knows. Patrick knows everything, maybe has a better idea of the truth of Jonny’s paltry showing; his meager, piteous offering to Patrick, because Patrick knows his heart better than even Jonny can. Patrick is sustained by Jonny’s patheticism. It is Jonny’s flaws that feed Patrick, not anything he is capable of or worth. 

The fact that Patrick is some kind of demon barely registers, other than to rip through Jonny, whetted betrayal and crushing shame, when he remembers that Patrick isn’t like him, and he isn’t like Patrick. They’ll never be the same. Jonny will never ever, never no matter what have him, and maybe it’s because they’re nothing alike, but maybe it’s because of that and all of Jonny’s other shortcomings, in comparison. 

Sleep comes to Jonny when he has nothing else. When he is cold and alone, aching and hungry in a hundred different ways. He tosses and he turns, his feet kicking at the covers, turning his face away from the dark, empty air of his bedroom only to find the space between his pillows, his sheets cool, his neck cricking. 

{Across the river, Patrick has long since fallen into easy slumber, warm and sated with his belly full. He sleeps with his mouth smudging smiles into his pillows, his dreams wild and vibrant.} 

 

____

 

**On my knees and praying.  
(that nothing in this world will ever break my heart again.)**

 

The morning after is the morning after. It does not bring with it the revelation, hoped and prayed for, that last night was simply a new and different kind of Halloween nightmare. One that wasn’t real. 

Jonny stares at his blank ceiling, and tries to train his thoughts to mirror it, because he can’t afford to sacrifice more minutes or hours to trying to find some sense of peace on this. Time and practice wait for no man, and besides, Jonny is pretty sure he could get to be as old as Patrick is before any of this ever became something he could deal with. 

Not dealing with it at all sounds like the plan of action most likely to see today and this week and this month run as smoothly as possible for Jonny and his team, so that’s the one he decides to go with. Patrick is hundreds of years old at least, he’s more than a big boy, so he can handle these revelations however the hell he wants to, no pun intended. 

Jonny is going to do a very convincing job of not caring either way, of not knowing that a single thing has changed; has always been changed. They’ll continue to put the idea of a Stanley Cup hangover to bed and then some, and everything will go on as normal. 

They can do this. Jonny can do this. 

 

____

 

**baby you’ll be fine,  
(but if you don’t mind, I’ll never recover.)**

 

Practice goes really, really well. Everything goes precisely according to plan, there are no bumps, no fumbles, no fuck ups. All is exactly as it always has been and should be. 

But then five minutes pass, and Patrick arrives. 

For a little while it’s like everything really will be okay, because they all manage to strip down and suit up without major incident, with the usual level of crass, horrific locker room jabbering and jawing. They make it out onto the ice, the entire team, and there has been no injury or disaster, no more shocking revelations or divine tragedies, no earthquakes or witchcraft or zombie outbreaks or acts of god. 

Jonny’s about ready to label it a miracle, when Patrick decides it’s somehow totally acceptable to score a gorgeous goal off a rebound Jonny didn’t even mean to give him, and then look at Jonny, smiling, like nothing has changed. Like this is just another day when they do great things and love each other, albeit it in different ways. Like he’s not a fucking liar, like he hasn’t turned Jonny’s world upside-fucking-down. Or turned the whole world period on its head, and left Jonny feeling like he doesn’t have one left at all. Patrick looks at him like he doesn’t _know_ that Jonny still wants to do anything Patrick asks of him, still wants to be anything Patrick might need him to be. Like they’re still just teammates and friends, one with a neverending, unrequited crush on the other, but equals in all other regards. Like they don’t both know now that Patrick is what he is, and Jonny is how he is, for him. 

“I think I could hate you, one day,” Jonny promises, knocking Patrick’s stick out of his hands as they skate back to the blue line to go again, but it’s a lie and they both know that too. This is confirmed by how Patrick’s mouth falls open before he can reply, and he stumbles on his skates, as ungraceful as Jonny has ever seen him. He tries to mask it, dragging his tongue across his bottom lip like that’s what he was going for all along, but Jonny doesn’t miss the way Patrick’s eyes dart, warmly, gratefully, to his ‘C’ and what’s underneath it. 

He knows he’ll never make it as far as hatred, but maybe, Jonny thinks, maybe one day he’ll make it as far as wanting to hate Patrick. A boy can dream, after all. And who knows - maybe one of Jonny’s other teammates, present or future, will have some kind of preternatural use for that, too. 

 

____

 

**I know why you’re lonely  
(it’s time you knew it too)**

 

On a day to day level, nothing changes. Hockey remains the center of their universe, and they stay held in place by it; fixed to it and by extension tied to one another. 

Jonny can’t do anything about how tied their fates are; how exponentially more complicated that facet of their connection has been revealed to be, but he can limit the time they spend in one another’s company. And oh, does he. 

Beyond resentful glares and razor sharp but hushed, hissed rebuffs during practices, training, tape sessions and time spent on the road, Jonny doesn’t speak to Patrick. Jonny doesn’t look at Patrick. Jonny doesn’t acknowledge the tragic fact that Patrick exists, unless he’s specifically asked to by a coach or teammate or reporter, because sometimes he can almost convince himself that he’d be better off if he didn’t. 

Almost. And only ever almost. At most. 

Jonny’s life would be easier if Patrick wasn’t around - if he’d never come around in the first place. But Jonny can’t give him up now, and he can’t bring himself to wish that he could. Patrick here with him, even like this, is what Jonny wants. It’s all Jonny wants. 

So right now he’s pissy, he’s angry and he’s confused and he’s bitterly disappointed and he’s hurt, and hurt, and _hurt_. But he won’t be for long, because there’s no point. 

Patrick doesn’t call him on it, or try to force conversation. He stays as close to Jonny as Jonny will let him get, even when that’s not very, and he watches and he waits. He doesn’t push closer, or push at all, and Jonny hates that, and he nearly appreciates it too. 

Jonny doesn’t have time to waste, but Patrick … Patrick does. 

 

____

 

**if you’re cold and you’re alone,  
(and you don’t know where to go)**

 

People start asking questions, is the thing. And Jonny can’t lie, he’s relieved. He’s grateful for the excuse to get closer to Patrick again, if only minutely, if only for a time. 

He has missed him. 

He hates himself so much more than he could ever hate Patrick. 

 

____

 

**I am no angel.**

 

They sit together at a team meal, in a hotel in Dallas. More accurately - Jonny fills a plate and carries it over to where Patrick is sitting, and then he sits down beside him without looking at Patrick or anyone else. The sigh of relief the room collectively breathes isn’t exactly audible, but Saad’s low “thank fucking god,” is. 

Their elbows brush, and Patrick steals food from Jonny’s plate, from his fork, from his fingers. Their knees touch underneath the table, and Patrick doesn’t pull away. Out of the corner of his eye, Jonny sees him smile at the tablecloth when Jonny doesn’t pull away, either. Jonny doesn’t reach out to touch him, but he wants to, and he wants to know that he can. He wants to put his hand on Patrick’s wrist or tuck his ankle in against Patrick’s, or pull his chair closer and shelter them from their teammates with the tilt of his shoulders, with the illusion of privacy - of intimacy - for just a minute, just a little while. These desires bloom in Jonny one after the other, in an instant, flooding his heart and blocking his breath until Patrick knocks it loose, digging a sharp, seemingly errant elbow into the space under Jonny’s ribs when he startles next to him, his fork clattering noisily to the floor and his palm striking the table hard like he’s in pain, like he’s shocked by it. 

“You okay?” Jonny asks quietly, leaning down to retrieve Patrick’s fork and bracing himself with a hand on Patrick’s shoulder even though he doesn’t have to. 

“Yeah … yeah, I think I … I’m fine.” Patrick doesn’t look fine. He looks exactly like he looked that night in Jonny’s apartment, when Jonny had seen him for the first time. The real him. Since then, he has looked like some blurred version of the two. Himself, but somehow not. 

He is starkly _other_ in that moment, sitting next to Jonny with both palms braced on either side of his plate, every vein and ligament in his hands and arms apparent and strained. 

As was the case before, Jonny is no less attracted to Patrick when he’s like this. He is no less thrilled to know that he can for some reason see Patrick in a way that this week has shown him no one else can. He’s proud of that. He doesn’t understand it, but he revels in it. Patrick is beautiful like this, but every which way he looks is some kind of wonderful, and Jonny has never looked at him and not wanted to fuck him senseless. It’s just that now he looks at him, next to him and demonic, and wants to fuck him monstrous; wants to bring out in Patrick every dark, ugly, inhuman, ethereal quality he posses, wants to see and feel and taste that, be the thing that breaks it out of Patrick. 

He’s not at all confident that he could do it, though, and that’s what breaks Jonny’s heart right then and there. Patrick might need something from him, might like the way Jonny gives it to him, but nothing about their conversation or anything that has happened since has shown Jonny that Patrick might want him. Want him the way Jonny wants Patrick. Him, only. Maybe Patrick thinks him up to the task of entertaining him for a measly human life cycle, but Jonny can never be Patrick’s everything the way Patrick is and has been and will be his. Nothing about any of this suggests that Jonny is enough to be too much for Patrick. 

Jonny is pulled out of his reverie by the near painful grip Patrick grabs his arm in, the startling heat of his touch, searing to the bare skin of Jonny’s forearm. 

Patrick reaches for him, and Jonny only needs to take one look at Patrick’s face to know that he does so with gratitude, from the undertows of pleasure. 

 

____

 

**nights with you like tunnel vision,  
(i know i’m falling, gonna ride it anyway)**

 

The hand that appears next to Jonny’s on the armrest on the flight home isn’t Patrick’s. 

Well it is, but it’s Sharpy’s. 

Jonny braces himself for a conversation he doesn’t want to have, and Sharpy braces himself on the seat in front of them to reach over and tug Jonny’s earbuds back out of his ears. 

“Let’s keep it short and sweet, captain. Just like you and the little monster,” Sharpy says, smiling, nodding to where Patrick is just boarding, immediately looking to Jonny and frowning when he sees Sharpy sitting with him. Jonny’s heart skips a beat for what Sharpy just unknowingly said, but picks up pace at the thought that Patrick is disappointed to find the seat next to Jonny taken already. “So you’re all good, then? Now? I mean … the look of love and all …” 

For years now, Sharpy has been convinced that Patrick and Jonny are hooking up on the down low, and for years Jonny has been denying it. He’d just always thought that would get easier over time, rather than harder. 

“We’re fine, we’re still not banging, we’re not ever going to be banging, everything is - I repeat - fine, now go bother someone else, eh? The other guys will get jealous if you only ever pull my pigtails, Sharpy,” Jonny says, trying to be … something other than totally dismissive, because he actually wants Sharpy to leave. 

“Awww I didn’t know you cared,” Sharpy coos, pursing his mouth at Jonny and blowing him kisses the entire walk up the plane, back to his seat next to Leddy. 

“What was that about?” Patrick asks, dropping into the seat Sharpy just vacated so fast that Jonny is startled into almost spilling his drink, is sure it must still be warm. 

“Nothing much,” he says, putting his earbuds back in and thumbing the volume on his ipod, setting it as high as it can go, “just my shortcomings as a human being and your shortcomings as whatever the fuck you are.” 

Jonny closes his eyes and tries, not in vain, to sleep. 

When he wakes up as the plane starts to descend, he’s looking at the ceiling and his neck hurts from how he’s been sleeping with it stretched out, throat bare. Patrick is still awake next to Jonny, eyes on the blank screen in front of him and his hands in his lap. 

 

____

 

**not your savior  
wrestle to the ground ; god help me now because - **

 

Jonny is waiting, and it seems like Patrick is, too. 

Jonny doesn’t know what exactly it is that he’s waiting for, or what more there could possibly still be to come, but there’s a snap of anticipation in every small, brief exchange he lets himself indulge in with Patrick. There’s a tension, an awfully good kind, that winds its way through every room they share, cinching them closer to together, making Jonny feel its pull in the pit of his stomach, in the wasteland behind his ribs. 

Patrick watches him sometimes, considering him in that same idle way he had the first night, the one that made Jonny feel like he was waiting to become prey. Waiting for his chance to prove his worth in that regard. 

Maybe that’s what this world and Patrick’s still have in store for them. Maybe that’s how their fates are tied to meet and end. Jonny tries not to get his hopes up. 

 

____

 

**nothing scares me anymore.**

 

Jonny’s mind tends to wander when he’s watching hockey, whether that’s games from around the league or footage of himself and his team. Hockey uses a different part of Jonny’s brain, it seems like, some kind of cognitive muscle memory that allows Jonny to see what he’s seeing and touch it over in his mind, put it in place, without it ever taking center stage in his focus. It’s practise, it has become automatic, and Jonny does some of his best and very worst thinking when he’s facing a big screen or has an ipad in his hands. 

Right now he’s reviewing the goals from their game against Edmonton, tucked away at one end of the bench with his skates still on, but having pulled a hoodie over his head when practice ended. Jonny has rarely if ever been the first to leave the ice or the arena, but lately he finds himself loathe to leave at all. Home no longer holds any kind of lure or promise for him. None of the relief that home is supposed to mean. 

Today Jonny is thinking about what a great hockey player Patrick is, and how totally hopelessly in love with him Jonny is, because they’re hockey players and it’s a day that ends in ‘y’. He’s thinking specifically of what these goals will look like when it’s Jonny all by himself, when he can’t even skate over to the bench to bump Patrick’s fist after he scores, or jump up after Patrick scores, expecting and receiving some kind of instant recognition - a smile or a wink that’s just for Jonny. He’s thinking about what it would be like to play hockey on this team that he thinks of as theirs, and to be not only alone, but knowing too that Patrick was somewhere else. Probably not playing hockey, but not here, not with Jonny. In another city, in another country. Surrounded by a million other people who could feed him with their heartbreak, but not the way Jonny does. Jonny’s heartbreak would go to waste. 

Patrick had said that wasn’t what he wanted, and it’s so far from what Jonny wants it makes his stomach churn with dread, but Patrick isn’t working to the same kind of timeline that Jonny is. He doesn’t think and feel and act the same way at all. Maybe he’d only been trying to pacify Jonny. Maybe he could break his promises to Jonny as easily as Jonny could break promises for Patrick. He has no reason to believe otherwise. It could happen. It might happen. Any day now could be the one when Patrick decides he’s bored after all. Jonny can’t count on a single day from now on as one when he can know Patrick will be there, and Jonny is terrified. Nothing scares him as much as the thought of Patrick leaving. Patrick being gone. 

It’s while he’s in the midst of this blackhole of thought that Patrick appears, showered and changed after practice but back to look for Jonny. One minute he’s totally alone aside from the zamboni guy, and the next he looks up and Patrick is there, leaning against the glass with his arms folded. He’s wearing sweatpants and a tee, his arms bare up to his biceps, and Jonny winces. He looks at Patrick watching him, and he is so in love with him that that in itself is what breaks his heart this time, because it’s too much to try and survive when he knows it’ll never matter, and he’ll never recover from it. 

Patrick’s mouth falls open on a low, broken sound, and he stumbles as he makes his way down the bench to where Jonny is sitting astride it. He stumbles in his haste to get to Jonny, and when he does he reaches for him with a tremble in his hands and something that should probably frighten Jonny in his eyes. 

Jonny isn’t afraid of much anymore, because all of his worst fears, bar one, have already come true. 

Looming over him, his fingers knotted in Jonny’s hair and one hand fisted in the front of Jonny’s tshirt, Patrick kisses Jonny like he never intends to stop. Jonny gasps for breath, but never for one second pulls away, and Patrick rewards him for that with his tongue. 

Never having felt more human than he does then, Jonny touches Patrick’s cheekbones, the line of his jaw. He brushes his fingers over the soft skin behind his ears and lets his thumbs trace the long column of his throat until it’s not enough, because it will never be enough. Jonny’s body is uselessly mortal, and he’ll never know Patrick the way he needs to know him, but he also thought he’d never know him like this - wild and panting in front of him, his breath hot and unsteady on Jonny’s lips. 

Jonny’s head is still spinning when Patrick pulls him to his feet, touching him like Jonny’s body is _his_ in some way, and Jonny loves him, oh how he loves him. 

“Fucking god,” Patrick swears, his eyes falling closed and his forehead creasing up in pain, his jaw clenched and lovely, “could you stop that for like five seconds?” 

 

____ 

 

**a part of you.  
(for a part of me)**

 

Jonny reels. 

He physically reels back from Patrick until his shoulders hit the glass, and he emotionally reels from Patrick’s words until he feels shaky and faint, aching and nauseous. 

“You -- you kissed me,” is all he can say. 

“Not that,” Patrick tells him, sparing a glance for Jonny’s mouth, and Jonny is only barely relieved, because whatever else is the problem, he got to kiss Patrick and maybe still gets to. His heart swells with that knowledge, and Patrick pokes him sharply in the chest. 

“ _That_ ,” he says, swallowing with what looks like effort and glaring at Jonny, his eyes dark and clouded with something Jonny can somehow tell is pain, because more awareness of Patrick and Patrick’s body is definitely what he needs. 

Dumbly, Jonny looks down at where Patrick’s finger is prodding him. Right over his heart. Oh. He looks back up at Patrick, blinking as his mind clears, and then he laughs. Patrick’s frown deepens, his eyebrows getting in on the act, and Jonny laughs harder. 

“Stop loving you!?” he asks, incredulous, because jesus. Good luck with that, Patrick. “Just … stop?” He’s close to choking now, tears forming in his eyes because that’s … oh god, that’s … “That’s never going to happen.” 

Patrick looks dumbfounded by all of this, and Jonny can’t stop laughing, because he looks like a petulant child; he looks like a toddler who isn’t getting his way, and it’s more than a relief to see him looking so human for once. To see him confused. 

“But why would you … you wouldn’t really want me to, right? If I’m not in love with you then my heart can’t break for you. You need me to love you. How is it a bad thing at all?” 

Even as he mulls the question over, Patrick still looks lost. Uncertain and vulnerable in a way that makes him seem younger than Jonny used to think he was. It gives Jonny back an old sense of fondness that he’d thought would take much longer to return, and Patrick gasps. 

“It fucking hurts now,” he gripes, taking his hand back to put it over his own heart instead. “Your heartbreak is still everything it ever was, more now because you know what I am and how this works and you still love me, your heart still all but stops every time you realize how fruitless your love will always be. But the times when you fall a little harder, a little further … those are different now, somehow. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it and I’ve never experienced it before. This is supposed to be so simple, but now it’s not. It hurts like a fucking bitch,” he whines, palm still protective on his own chest, and Jonny makes a valiant attempt to give him what he needs. It’s not hard to dredge up a thought that makes Jonny’s heart feel hollowed out, rotten and empty. He thinks about Patrick walking away and never looking back, and Patrick sighs in relief. 

“Thanks,” he says, “thank you, that was -- you’re -- oh, that’s perfect,” he says, hands going to Jonny’s shoulders now, and Jonny reaches for his waist in return. 

“No problem,” Jonny can say sincerely and soberly, with no mirth left in his body, “Let’s get you home, and we can try to figure this out.” 

 

____

 

**no bolt nor brick nor crucifix  
(can hold it back)**

 

Getting Patrick into the front seat of Jonny’s car alone is about as easy a task as wrestling a drunken octopus. He’s languid and doped up on Jonny’s pain, sprawled in his seat with his knees splayed apart and his hands helping themselves to Jonny’s body heat like that better communicates the gratitude he references in speech, so Jonny quickly gives up on the idea of leaving him home alone and drives them both back to his place so he can keep an eye on Patrick, so he can try to figure out what’s going on even if Patrick is too out of it to help. 

“C’mon, just stop touching me until we get inside and then you can … then we’ll talk,” Jonny hastily amends on the fly, because he can’t make the kind of promises that he’d like to make, given the potential result that anything that makes Jonny love Patrick more will hurt Patrick in return. Patrick isn’t pleased about taking his hands out of Jonny’s pocket and out from up under his shirt, but he does as he’s told and it’s a wretched, worrying thing indeed. 

“Best human,” he says softly, happily, clumsily pawing at Jonny’s face as he hauls him into the elevator. “So talented, so giving, so grateful to sacrifice for me,” he croons with his face smushed into the place where Jonny’s shoulder meets his neck, his mouth pressed right to Jonny’s skin, hot and familiar. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally adore you, I’d die for you,” Jonny tells him as he lets Patrick lean on him to step out onto his floor, leads him to his front door. It’s true. It’s frighteningly, terribly true, and Patrick shudders where he’s bracing himself on Jonny’s shoulders, shaking against him through his enjoyment of Jonny’s heartache. The last thing they need is for Patrick to go deeper into this stupor, so once Jonny has ushered him inside and pushed him gently onto the couch, he stands over Patrick and looks at his face, the broad planes of his chest. He looks at Patrick’s hands and thinks about all the goals they’ve helped Jonny score. He thinks about the next time they win the Stanley Cup, and for a moment he lets himself believe that they’ll do it like they’ve always done it - together - and Patrick curls into himself on the couch, groaning and slapping a hand over his eyes like the light is hurting, like everything is hurting. 

“Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” Jonny says in a rush, dropping to his knees and reaching for Patrick’s face himself, concentrating on thinking about lifting the Cup in front of a line of teammates that Patrick isn’t in, until Patrick can look at him, “Was that too much? I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just wanted you to get you out of the pain haze. Are you … is this better? Are you feeling okay? Back with me?”

“Yeah, yes,” Patrick says, blinking hard and frowning, but he doesn’t seem to be in pain, still, “You couldn’t have gotten me a glass of water or some smelling salts instead?” 

Snarky is good. Snarky is very good. 

“Next time, bud,” Jonny promises, although privately he thinks his methods are far superior. “So we should talk about this, right? Are you hungry, do you want … wait. I didn’t -- do you even eat like … people food?” 

“You’ve seen me eat, Jonny. You’ve seen me eat every day for years now.” His tone is flat and unamused, and Jonny has missed it so much. 

“Sorry, yeah. I’ll … pasta? Or I could do salmon rolls and rice?” Patrick shrugs, which Jonny takes to mean he doesn’t mind either way, so he goes to prepare their meals and steel himself for this conversation. His heart is racing all over again now, frightened steady by Patrick’s stupor but caught up all over again in the moment when Patrick kissed him like it’d kill him not to. He tries to keep a lid on it, but he hears Patrick swearing faintly from the living room anyway. 

By the time he comes back with their food, he has it under control, and Patrick is no longer glaring, doesn’t look lost to the throes of ecstasy either, thank god, because that’s a really fucking good look on him and Jonny isn’t ready to be faced with it again now or ever. 

They eat, and then they talk. Like polite, well mannered young men. Young man and old other. 

“So this isn’t how it always is?” Jonny asks the second they’ve put their empty plates down on the coffee table, because this feels like a place to start. This seems to be new to Patrick, and Jonny can’t resist the lure of that; can’t turn down the chance for them to work on this together. Almost as equals, maybe. 

“No. This is different, and it’s never been different before. It’s been the same way since the beginning, so I can’t … I don’t understand how it has changed,” Patrick says, not shy about sharing with Jonny, and Jonny warms. 

“But … I’m different, right? You said that -” 

“Yes, you’re special,” Patrick interrupts, quick to make the distinction, and when he looks at Jonny with wide, serious eyes there’s nothing there that suggests mollification to Jonny. He knows Patrick has no real need or reason to try and butter him up or get him on side, but he appreciates Patrick’s haste to call a spade a spade. He really appreciates hearing it said. 

“So if you experience my heartbreak differently, then it stands to reason that you’d experience the inverse differently too, right? If my heartbreak feeds you, keeps you alive, feels good and all that,” Jonny rushes, trying to gloss over that part, because he’s had to see Patrick looking all too close to rapture lately, and he doesn’t need to know how far that goes, “then my heart doing the opposite of breaking is going to hurt you, it’s going to … shit, is it killing you? Is that even impossible? I kind of got the impression you were immortal. You are, aren’t you?” Jonny doesn’t know what answer he wants to hear, because he doesn’t want to think he or anything else could kill Patrick if there’s a possibility that he can’t die, can’t ever be seriously hurt. He doesn’t want to think about Patrick living forever without him, but Patrick has already lived for long enough that Jonny will only ever be a blip on his timeline, so the ship where Jonny might actually mean something to Patrick in the long run has sailed and been subsequently shipwrecked. All he can hope for is mattering to Patrick now, and he doesn’t want to matter to him by hurting him. He never wants that. 

“I’m not … death doesn’t work the same way for me. For my kind, and those like it rather than like yours. I won’t ever die, but this version of me could. I’ve been living here like this for hundreds and hundreds of years, but it’s possible that I could be … stopped. Paused, in a sense. I don’t think you have the power to do that, though, so you shouldn’t worry,” Patrick says in a way that Jonny thinks is meant to be reassuring. It is, but it contains no small helping of added condescension. Jonny decides to be offended later. 

“Okay, so I can’t kill you. Then why does it hurt so bad when I love you?” 

Patrick thinks about it, and Jonny knows from the way he knows Patrick’s face, knows from how well he knows Patrick period that he has an idea of what’s causing this. Jonny also knows from experience that it’s an idea Patrick is not readily prepared to accept. 

“I suspect … I suspect it’s not your love that’s the problem. It’s me. It’s me knowing that you love me and … not … not completely rejecting that emotion in you. From you.” Jonny could use a stiff drink or fifteen right now. Maybe a parade. Some balloons, at the very least, because it sounds like Patrick is telling him that on some level, the love he feels for Patrick actually registers for Patrick. Means something to him in some way. Matters to him, even. 

“Oh don’t preen just yet, you brat. If the problem is what I think it is, we are - to put it bluntly - pretty fucking fucked. This would be a disaster, and not just for me.” That definitely takes the dawning smile from Jonny’s face, but he’s okay with swapping it for the hand Patrick holds out for him to take. Jonny knots his fingers through Patrick’s and holds on, will keep holding on until Patrick pulls away. 

“But why? It seems pretty frigging fair to me. I get hurt, and that helps you. You being hurt doesn’t help me, but there’s a balance to it. Why should I be the only one in pain?” 

“It’s not about fairness, sweetheart,” Patrick tells him, and to his credit he sounds sorry about that, “I’ve never … this will make me sound callous to you, but I’ve never cared before, about how what feeds me makes the body it comes from feel. It never mattered.” 

“But it does now?” Jonny looks at their joined hands instead of into Patrick’s face, because he’s brave enough to ask the question, but he isn’t brave enough to watch Patrick answer. 

“Yes. It matters now,” Patrick insists, driving his point home by cupping Jonny’s cheek in his other hand, running his thumb so gently along the curve of Jonny’s chin that the touch almost hurts more than his heartbreak does, “I have been trying so hard to enjoy your heartbreak and think nothing of you otherwise, feeling nothing for you besides. On All Hallow’s Eve I tried to tell you that you meant nothing more to me. I’ve never had to try before.” Patrick has to swallow before he can continue. “I can barely stand to see you hurt. Before you knew what I was and what I need from you, I’d forget that I couldn’t die, when I had to watch you in pain. I’m hundreds of years old, nothing on this earth has the power necessary to kill me, and I’d _forget_ that in the face of your suffering, Jonathan. I’d forget who and what I am, because it didn’t seem to matter. Not when I couldn’t help you.” 

“You’re making it really hard to be in agonizing, unrequited love with you right now, Kaner,” Jonny grits out from between his teeth, trying his hardest anyway because he won’t ever hurt Patrick if he can help it. 

Patrick winces at him as he smiles, but he doesn’t let go of Jonny and he doesn’t try to move away from him, away from the pain he has to be feeling. 

“It’s still unrequited, I’m afraid. I can’t … I’m incapable of loving you the way you love me, and you have to understand that. You must know so. But when you found out what I am - and the very fact that you did is unheard of, it’s impossible - you did know so. The taste of your agony became so much stronger, so much sweeter. I … I love the way your heart breaks. I love it more than you could ever love me. I love it like this planet loves your sun planet. I love it like your Canadians love hockey,” Patrick laughs, “I’d die for it, if I had to. If I could. It makes everything else, even hockey, seem like an endless, pointless trial I must withstand before I can have it again. And it has never for one moment felt like that before. Do you understand? You … the way you love me, the strength of what you feel for me and the magnitude of what you go through when you think about how you’ll never have me - you showed me what it was like, to find something to love. I didn’t know, before you. The way your heart breaks now could drive me mad with want, but it comes with a price because everything necessary does. Knowing the truth of what I am, you love me for that still. And I can’t have your heartbreak without acknowledging the truth of it in turn. For your heartbreak, I have to know and survive your love. The whole awful reality of it. Every little bit and piece. Every bloom, every petal. Unless I’m prepared to give up the part of you I want most, I have to take you in your sum. And so, you see our predicament.” 

Jonny doesn’t. He really doesn’t. He fucking refuses to. 

“No. I don’t. I don’t see a problem with any of that. We stay together forever. For my forever, at least. You feed off my heart break, and you put up and shut up about the pinch of my gross love for you. Done deal. Where’s the problem?” 

Again, Patrick looks surprised by Jonny, and Jonny is about to get called a brat again, because he really can’t help how that makes him preen. He is unashamedly proud of the fact that he can rock Patrick’s world, even if only a little bit. So far. 

“The problem therein is yours, Jonathan. Because it doesn’t have to be like this for you. The best this situation can offer you is symbiosis. A mutually beneficial -” 

“Yeah, I took Bio 101, Patrick, I know what symbiosis is. I also know you’re a fucking lunatic. How does your logic even work? You could kill for my heartbreak, but you have to try and talk me out of offering it up? Where is your warrior spirit, Kaner? What makes you so willing to give up something you claim you don’t want to have to live without?” 

“I told you, dickface, I care about your fucking feelings. Gods help me, I care about you, you total shitshow. So don’t give me a hard time for it. Not when there are literally fifty other things you could legitimately have me on a rack for, right now.” 

Jonny grins at Patrick, and he doesn’t press their grins together when Patrick returns it, because he’s learning all kinds of things about inhuman levels of self control today. Today, right now, this is the first time things have felt right since everything went so wrong. Jonny won’t yet let himself think that things have turned out to be better than they were before, now that he knows what they’re dealing with and just how interconnected they could let themselves be. Forever. For always. 

“You realize I’ve spent the last couple of hours purposefully walking myself through the hall of fame for thoughts that make me wish I’d never been born, right? And I didn’t get anything out of that. I did it because I had to. Because I can’t stand to see you in pain either, even though you’ve probably got superhuman strength and can take ten times what I can. I …” the smile slips off Jonny’s face and he re-adjusts his grip on Patrick’s fingers, holds on tight, “I don’t want to know what it would be like to live without you. I never thought we could be together, I never thought you’d love me back, but now I know what you are and you know my terrible secret too, so we can live together forever. No secrets, just us. That’s what I want. And my heartbreak is what you want, so. That’s that, yeah? That’s it decided.” 

“You’re an idiot,” Patrick tells him, making it sound like the term of endearment that Jonny knows it to be with a fond smile, “You could tell me to go. You could find someone else to love. You could be happy with someone who didn’t make you hurt for it, Jonny. You deserve that much, at least.” 

“I deserve whatever I decide I want,” Jonny corrects him, closing his eyes and nuzzling into the hand Patrick still has on his face, pressing a kiss into the palm of Patrick’s hand, “And I want you. That’s my choice. You. However I can have you. Whatever it takes.” His voice has dropped to a whisper, and he feels like the one who’s drunk now. He matters more to Patrick than he ever thought he could, and he can give Patrick a reason to stay. They can make this work, and they both have incentive to give it their all. It’s the closest Jonny will ever get to having what he wants, even if it will mean a process that centers around his never getting it. It’s close, and with Patrick that’s more than enough for Jonny. It’s so much more than he’d hoped for. 

“So you’re staying, right? Until … until there’s nothing left for you to stick around for.” Jonny still needs to hear Patrick say it. He needs to hear it and believe it. 

“That’s what I want. So if it’s what you want too, then it would seem to make the most sense, I suppose,” Patrick pretends to mull it over, to waver, but Jonny knows him better than that. He can see it in Patrick’s eyes and he can feel it in the pads of his fingertips, still soft on Jonny’s skins, that he means it. 

“Thank you,” Jonny says, so heartfelt it hurts them both, and Patrick looks at him in wonder. 

“How can you … how are you like this? How can you know so much gratitude toward me? All I do is take from you, hurt you and benefit from it, when you get nothing in return. How can you thank me for that?” 

“You don’t get it,” Jonny says, and he’s sad that that’s the truth. If Patrick were human, if Patrick was who Jonny had always thought he was, he could understand it, Jonny thinks. But he isn’t, he’s not human, and he doesn’t know what it’s like to be Jonny and to know Patrick. He can’t know what it might have been like for a human Patrick who might have met Jonny, could have loved him. “You don’t hurt me. Loving you and having it go to waste hurts me. Feeling it and knowing that it does nothing - changes nothing - is what hurts me. But you can use it, even if you can’t return it. It helps you. Me loving you gives you something that you need, it brings you pleasure and it made you see what it means to love something or someone, so it doesn’t matter how that happens. I love you and you know that, you use that and you can stay. We both get what we need. We can be happy together.” 

“We can certainly try,” Patrick says, bringing their still joined hands up to his mouth and kissing Jonny’s knuckles. 

“We’ll be as great at that as we are at everything else,” Jonny promises and believes. But. “But we still need to figure out what happened today. Why were you in some kind of stupor when I dragged you back here? My heart break has never hit you that hard before, right? I feel like I’d have noticed that. So what changed? You said it’s been different since I found out what you are, but that was some next level shit. What happened? Was it because you -- um. You know. Kissed me?” 

“No. I kissed you because something had changed, not the other way around.” 

“So what had changed?” 

For the first time in hours, Jonny worries that Patrick might leave. He won’t go far, and it won’t be for long, but Patrick shifts in his seat and Jonny instinctively tightens the grip he has on his hand like he could stop Patrick from moving away from him. Patrick shifts again, he’s clearly uncomfortable, but he doesn’t make a move to go. 

“Some part of what has been transpiring between us has started to affect how we know one another. What we experience from one another. You might notice a kind of subtle bleed through in terms of what I’m feeling, some small hints of that. Or you might have a heightened awareness of me when I’m near. I’d been told that that could happen if I fed from the same person … habitually. But it goes both ways, apparently. I couldn’t believe it, at first. I knew that what you give me feeds me better than anyone else’s offering ever has, but I thought that was it. I thought as much even after we first spoke about this. I didn’t think you were what was different. But I feel little slices of what you’re feeling, and it changes your heartbreak. Today, at practice … when you were sitting on the bench, you were thinking about losing me, weren’t you? You were thinking about what might happen if I left you.” 

“Yeah,” Jonny admits, swallowing and hoping the motion will drive back the instinct to think those thoughts again. He has to pull his knees up onto the couch and sit cross-legged next to Patrick, so close that his knees are touching the line of Patrick’s thigh. He has to know that while Patrick was here, Jonny did everything he could to stay close to him, to stay open for him no matter how much it might hurt. “I was. Could you - did you feel that? That was why you kissed me?” 

“No. I kissed you because your heart breaks different ways, at different times, for different reasons. It’s like … a different flavour, to be crude about it. The thought that you might lose me is … it makes your heart break taste like nothing has ever tasted to me before. I can’t even begin to describe it to you, with only words. It was … it was so overwhelming, and you were swimming in it, the scent of it was all over you, and I wanted to see … I thought that if I kissed you, if I tasted you …” 

“You could get more? It might be even stronger at the source? Well. Was it?” And that’s another one of those questions that Jonny almost doesn’t want answered, because he can’t tell, even having asked it, what answer he’s looking for. 

Patrick looks at Jonny then with such heat in his eyes, such huge, fierce intent that he doesn’t need to say anything in answer. But he does. To make Jonny’s life miserable, presumably. He shifts to sit the way Jonny is; cross-legged on the couch so he can face Jonny completely. Probably for the same reason. He tucks his socked feet in over Jonny’s, between them, and never once lets go of Jonny’s hand as he does. Holding hands doesn’t feel like a gesture, or anything either of them have to stretch to make work and feel right. It’s comfortably easy. It’s effortless and pure instinct. 

“I could divide my whole life, the entire sum of it, into the days before today and today, Jonny. Into the seconds I’ve spent with my tongue in your mouth and the seconds that I wasted.” Jonny’s been told a few times that he’s a good kisser, but that kind of … that’s a pretty big deal even before you take into account the fact that it’s coming from Patrick. Jonny maybe forgets how to breathe for a second, forgets for a moment that his mouth has uses beyond pleasing Patrick. 

“So we should make out all the time, then. In fact, right now would be a pretty good time to -” but before Jonny can lean in and show Patrick what he can do when he puts his mind to it, Patrick puts his index finger on Jonny’s lips to stop him. He tilts his head again, the way he does now when he’s not hiding what he is from Jonny, but it looks considering this time, like he’s thrown by the offer. Tempted, maybe, if that’s not just Jonny’s wishful thinking. 

“Sometimes, maybe. Again, definitely. But we can’t be intimate with one another, not always. And you know that, Jonathan. It’s an implicit part of what we have.” 

“ _Why_?” Jonny asks, affronted, because he thinks it’ll sound better than ‘but whyyyyyyyy.’ 

“Oh, don’t let me down now, darling. You know why. If we lie together, you’ll have what you want. Your heart will heal. And where will that leave us?” 

For the first time since this whole thing started to unravel around him, Jonny is seriously, indignantly offended. Not to mention disappointed. He can’t believe he has just been underestimated not only by Patrick, but by a demon Patrick that’s old enough to know better. 

“How fucking dare you! You’re the one letting me down right now, mister ‘I’ve been alive forever, I know everything there is to know about your weakling kind’. Do you really think that’s all this is for me? Because admittedly, you’re so hot it doesn’t even make sense to me sometimes, but I didn’t fall for you because of your body, no matter how badly I want it. I still love you after finding out you’re a fucking demonic heartbreak eater, Kaner. Does that strike you as a superficial kind of affection? Something that only stirs in me when I think about sticking my dick in you? Fuck you, dude. Or not, actually. Fuck you never, you little jerk. My love for you is pure and deep. It’s fucking serious, Kaner.” 

“So serious that we could sleep together? We could play together and sleep together and be friends and teammates and see each other every day and all of that still wouldn’t be enough for you? What more could you possibly want from me? What else is there?” 

Jonny pities Patrick, he thinks. He doesn’t know the extent of what he is or every reality of how he lives, how he feels and what life has been like for him, but if he can’t imagine what else there is to want from someone you’re in love with, Jonny feels sorry for him. 

“There’s knowing that you love me, you moron. Do you think any of that would matter to me if I thought I could ever know what it would be like to be _loved_ by you? Because you don’t know a goddamn thing if you do. Sleeping with you would just make it worse. Having you in my bed and knowing I’d never get to wake up next to you and see you open your eyes and look at me like you never wanted to be anywhere else … that would probably kill me, Patrick.” He means it. He does. Just the thought of it makes his stomach roll. 

But with some foreboding mixture of dread and horror and excitement, because. 

“Actually, that might be the best idea I’ve ever had.” 

“Jonny, we don’t have to do this, suicide really isn’t the -” 

“Oh shut up, not that. Sleeping together. Like this, knowing what we know. You said my heart breaks better when I think about losing you, right? So can you imagine how it would break if I had you, had you almost every way I want you, and had to cope with the fear of losing that? That sounds pretty tantalizing to me, and I’ve never even tasted someone’s broken heart.” 

Patrick really does try to leave, then. He tugs his hand out of Jonny’s slowly, carefully, and when he has extracted himself from the overlapping nest they’ve steadily been constructing of their bodies for this conversation, he takes a deep breath and he looks at Jonny like he’s preparing to say goodbye. Like he has changed his mind. 

“This was … this was too much to expect of you. Too much to ask for. I can see that now. I’m sorry that I got your hopes up, I am, but you need to really hear me when I tell you that we’ll never be any more than we are right now, because we can’t be. It’s just not possible, and I know how badly you want to believe otherwise, I’ve tasted your hope for more so often. But you can’t talk me into this, Jonny. I’ve admitted that you have a certain sway over me, but as you so succinctly put it - I’m a demonic heartbreak eater. Not even you can persuade me to change my diet.” 

Patrick seems not only genuinely regretful, but sad about it. Sad that it has to come to this. Jonny may have mentioned - he’s an idiot. 

But thankfully, he’s also still totally easy for a misdirect, so when Jonny shrugs and pouts at him, seemingly accepting of Patrick’s summation of things, he falls for it. He is definitely not expecting it when Jonny grabs a hold of him by the hips and hauls him back onto the couch, pinning him down with his weight and will to keep Patrick there, underneath him. 

Held in place with his wrists trapped up over his head and Jonny solid and heavy across his hips, Patrick sighs up at Jonny like he finds the position tedious, but Jonny knows otherwise. Jonny can feel otherwise. 

“Let’s talk a little bit about the kind of sway I have over you, Patrick,” Jonny says, settling in to get comfortable and making a show of doing so. “Because the way I see it, I’ve been all you needed in this world for years now. I’m why you’ve stuck around this long. Me. Just me. So tell me again you don’t find me persuasive. Tell me one more time that you could walk away if you wanted to. We’ll never do anything you don’t want to do, but try to tell me that you could be around me and the way my heart breaks for you and never need to kiss me again. Never need more than that. Do your best to make it convincing, won’t you?” Jonny feigns control even though he feels totally out of it, because this is something he needs from Patrick the way Patrick needs his heartbreak - to survive. Jonny knows what it feels like when Patrick kisses him, now, and he won’t let him get away with framing this as something else Jonny is pathetic about, because there’s two of them in this, at least. 

In his fervour, Jonny has forgotten that one of them is supernatural. 

Patrick blinks up at him, and then flips them over in an instant, less than, weighting Jonny to his own couch with his hands on his biceps, his knees on either side of his thighs. 

It’s shocking that he manages it so fast, and not at all shocking that this is the hottest moment of Jonny’s life to date. It’s possible that he whimpers. 

“You are such an annoyance, Jonathan Toews,” Patrick tells him, and Jonny bristles. “You make everything so much more complicated, so much more difficult than it ever was or needed to be,” sounds more like the kind of compliment Jonny is angling for. “I want to know every single centimeter of this body of yours. More than that, I want to know how I can make you feel in it. I want to hear you beg for me, and sob when you get me. I want to watch you fall apart, body and heart and mind and soul, until I forget what you look like covered up and put together. I want to make a mess from our bodies together, and then I want to ruin whole worlds, entire universes with what we could be if we were united and equal. If you were like me and I was yours, you mine. I’ve never wanted anything, Jonny, and you have made me want everything all at once, all with you. Because of you.” Jonny has never heard Patrick’s voice sound the way it does when he says this, and it’s not because his voice has changed because of his nature and his differences. It’s because his voice is low and full, brimming over with feeling and it’s all for Jonny. His eyes are huge and dark, vast with what looks like a storm of emotion to Jonny, and Jonny can’t understand it all, but he can feel it where Patrick’s skin touches his, he can feel Patrick’s body like a livewire when it’s next to his, burning with need and intention, hope and promise that might not be like Jonny’s versions, but still count. 

“So take that, Patrick. Take everything you want, because I’m right here and I’m yours.” He doesn’t know how to say it any simpler, any louder, because it feels like he’s been shouting it for days now. For weeks and months and years. 

Patrick sits up, sits back, and Jonny panics for a second, but he only moves so he can see Jonny better in what has become the early evening haze of sundown. So he can trail his hands down the length of Jonny’s arms until his fingers are tracing the lines across his palms. 

“Are you? Are you mine?” Patrick asks him, and Jonny knows in that moment that it’s the first time Patrick has truly asked him anything. It could very well be the first time Patrick has had to ask anyone anything. 

“I always have been,” Jonny promises, “and I always want to be.” 

 

____

 

**i’m all you want, i’m all you need, i’m all you’ll ever have  
(no one will ever love you like i do)**

 

Walking twenty paces to his bedroom seems to take years, to Jonny, and yet years of his lifetime must pass like seconds for Patrick. 

Jonny swings wildly, helplessly between the fear of their differences - which has Patrick crowding up along his back, pushing Jonny’s shirt out of the way to get his hands on skin - and instinctual, learned reaction to his touch; finding himself so lost in love that only the punishing bite of Patrick’s grip going gracelessly, unintentionally bruising can begin to bring him back. 

When it’s with force that Patrick almost throws Jonny down onto his own bed, a thought that could ruin him occurs to Jonny. 

“Have you,” he starts to ask; tries, because Patrick has just taken two handfuls of Jonny’s shirt and neatly ripped it in two, “jesus fuck, do you -- have you -- you’ve slept with people before, right? Because,” Patrick’s mouth is so hot around Jonny’s nipple that he doesn’t know whether it’s the burn of it or the bite of Patrick’s teeth that stings, “ _fuck_ , you have to have, you’re like a million years old. But you said you’re pretty sure you’ve never killed anyone and this -” Jonny swears with vehemence when Patrick holds his hips down against the mattress and presses his face to the crotch of Jonny’s shorts, nuzzles at the line of his dick with his nose and open mouth; with deep breaths and a thick, eager tongue, “this -- no one could survive this. I’m not going to survive this.” 

It’s disorientating and disconcerting to watch the expression on Patrick’s face twist so instantly from one of blissed out hunger when he lifts his head to look at Jonny, into an expression etched in pain when the sight of Patrick here in his bedroom, between his legs, makes Jonny fall just a little bit harder in love with him. 

“Before, maybe. At the beginning,” Patrick’s breathing is laboured and his words shake. His hands make a trembling cradle around Jonny’s hips and Jonny can feel it in the way he’s held, can read it clear in ten other ways that he shouldn’t know how to recognize that it’s only half from nerves, half from the strain of trying to stay in control. “But not in lifetimes, and if I ever did this before, I don’t remember it now. If I did, it couldn’t compare. I’ve never needed -- I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you.” 

There’s no relief to be found in the nothing behind Jonny’s eyelids when he closes his eyes, so he goes in search of it somewhere else. He pushes at Patrick’s shoulders until he relents. When they’re on their knees in front of one another he lifts Patrick’s shirt up and off his body slowly, reverent. He fills his hands with Patrick and kisses him until pulling away makes his body feel like it doesn’t fit him right anymore, makes him feel off kilter and wrong without the heat of Patrick’s chest pressed to his, Patrick’s hands on his thighs, Patrick’s back endless under his palms. Jonny gets them turned around with his hands too eager on Patrick’s sides and his knees threatening to give out, and then he gets Patrick lying in the very center of his bed, looking up at Jonny like he’ll wait for him to do something only as long as he can; not long, not long at all. 

“I hate you for this,” Jonny tells Patrick as he pulls his sweats down off his legs, and Patrick smiles at him when he pushes his briefs to join them. It’s not a mocking smile. It’s not unkind or cruel or sharp. It’s soft, and it’s fond, and it’s probably the closest thing to loving that Jonny will ever see on Patrick’s face. Patrick’s eyes slip shut and hands that he could use to tear entire buildings - whole cities - to the ground clench desperately in Jonny’s comforter instead. Jonny goes to his hands and knees above him and presses his mouth to each of Patrick’s eyelids in turn, his arms straining with the effort it takes to keep him suspended over Patrick rather than sending him crashing down into him the way he wants. 

Patricks hands find their purchase in tight bands around Jonny’s biceps instead, and he doesn’t open his eyes but he lifts his chin and offers up his own throat when he says “I know you do, and I love you for it. Not the way you love me, but more than I ever thought I could. More than I’m capable of, Jonny. I know it’s not enough, but it’s still too much, I --” 

“Shh, shh. I get it. I feel it, I … I know,” Jonny soothes him, because Patrick is so clearly overwhelmed by all of this, so obviously, vastly lost in what he feels for Jonny, what he’s feeling because of him, and the room seems to swim around them in swirls of space and light, rolling tides of time that come and go around them, getting close and retreating far because nothing matters here but them. They shouldn’t make sense in this or any other combination, and Jonny can feel that in the quiet light that tries to sneak into the room to see, in the uncertainty that tries to lock into Patrick’s body before he eats it up with his hunger instead. The whole world feels dead and gone beyond them, pale and dry and crumbled into nothing next to the life that they bleed together, the newness and desire and need that swells in Patrick’s abdomen at the touch of Jonny’s fingers, the wild and feral joy that cracks against violent, bitter disappointment inside Jonny’s skull and rib cage when Patrick looks at him like he wants him for forever. 

“I want to feel you. I want you inside me. Do you -- can you do that for me? Can we … will you --” Words barely make sense to Jonny anymore. They’re communicating in ways that aren’t verbal, aren’t about sound or language or communication at all because Jonny can feel Patrick’s answers, can find the place in Patrick where Jonny’s questions register before he asks them, answered before they form in him because what it is in Jonny to want it is in Patrick to give, what Patrick needs Jonny sacrifices with ease, with pride. 

They’re waging war where they come together, because they shouldn’t be more with their hearts and minds and bodies joined, but they are and what should and shouldn’t be is nothing stacked up against that; can’t begin to tear away what grows where their hands meet. 

It’s a totally surreal mix of some kind of never and always packed tight into here and right now and Jonny’s head swims like it’s underwater, like he’s in a hundred different places at once. It doesn’t matter at all when he’s with Patrick everywhere he is, when what he feels he can know Patrick feels too; the inverse of it or some other breed, another type but just as much, a balanced and equal effort. 

“Oh, I can. I will, I will, we’ll -” Patrick says it even though he doesn’t have to, opens his eyes to show Jonny his answer in the soft and sharp angles of his face, the darkness in his eyes that Jonny wants to swallow him whole. 

Jonny laughs when Patrick rips his shorts off too, because it’s instinct to bitch at him for ruining two perfectly good items of clothing in one afternoon, when neither needed to be ruined, but Jonny is ruined and he hopes Patrick will be too, so it’s easy to let his laugh become something else instead when Patrick looks at Jonny’s now naked body in surprise that quickly turns hot, makes his breathing sound sharp when he takes Jonny’s cock in his hand and touches him like he’s the one who is grateful for it. 

There’s too much space between them, too much distance where there should be none, so Jonny lets his arms stay straining but slides his knees down against the outsides of Patrick’s thighs until their hips are stacked together and Patrick can slip both of his hands between them, hold his cock with Jonny’s in the warm crook of his fingers and thumbs. Jonny’s dick is wet at the head already, so hard that it almost startles him when he stops to actually register it, but it still doesn’t matter when it’s set up against the thought of Patrick’s cock inside him, so he ignores it again and adds the painful stretch of his shoulders, the ache of his left wrist when he brings his right hand to his mouth and then to his own hole, spit slicking the way as he starts to open himself up for Patrick. It stings, and he could not care less. It’s too much, and it feels just right. 

“Don’t,” Patrick says, his hands faltering and his eyes narrowing before going wide in something like fear, “That’s not enough, I’ll hurt you, I don’t want to, I won’t. It’s not enough. You. You don’t love others the way you love me, but do you want others the same way you want me now? Have you … other people love you. Other people could love you like you want, and they should, you should --” 

“I don’t care, I only want you,” Jonny tells him, and it’s an answer to both the suggestion that Patrick might hurt him and the question of whether or not Jonny wants these other people that Patrick seems to think could love him. “I do this by myself, sometimes, but never with anyone else. The thought seemed,” Jonny has to hiccup over a breath, push past it to find another when Patrick’s hand joins his, searching and gentle, “okay, maybe, but I always changed my mind when I could have, because I didn’t want to. I always wanted you instead, even though I never thought I’d get to have you like this.” 

Patrick flips them over in an instant, in less than a second again, and Jonny’s relief is found in how he can now press his face into his comforter and let his body be what it wants to be under Patrick, face down with his back to Patrick; vulnerable. Recklessly, endlessly trusting. 

“Did you think of me when you pressed your fingers up inside yourself? Did you think of me doing this to you instead?” It’s the easiest thing in the world to lift his hips up into it when Patrick takes his cheeks in his hands and holds him open, curls his tongue inside the rim of Jonny’s muscle like he could taste the times Jonny has fingered himself, like he can lap up the pleasure Jonny found in the thought of just this. Jonny doesn’t have to think anymore. “Fetch me your lube,” Patrick tells Jonny with his temple pressed to the dimple above his left cheek, his cheekbone a line of heat across it and the tips of two of his fingers still shallow in Jonny like he can’t bear to leave him empty. “Let me get you wet while you tell me all the ways you’ve thought of me.” 

It’s a stretch, and it’s too much effort, too much co-ordination when Jonny is capable of none, capable of nothing but whatever Patrick wants from him and what he needs from Patrick, but Jonny manages to fumble the drawer of his bedside table open and touch his way through its contents until he finds something vaguely the right shape. Patrick gently pries it from the desperate fist Jonny forms around it when Patrick gets tired of waiting and pushes both fingers into Jonny to the knuckle, and leaves a kiss in the palm of Jonny’s hand in exchange. 

“I thought of you like this. I thought of you over me and under and right here next to me. Waking up with your arm around me, dragging you back here after games and fucking the adrenaline away until we fell asleep sticky and sore. I thought about getting you hard, seeing you wanting and knowing it was for me. I think about sucking you off every time you score a goal, because you’re such a cocky little shithead and it twists me inside out, makes me want to see you cocky about how easy I am for you, how badly I want you. I think about you asking me to fuck you, and what you’d look like riding my cock. I think about licking your come off your belly and sinking my teeth into your throat, I think about seeing you bruised up and knowing it was because of me and because of hockey, knowing you didn’t need anything else in the world. I thought about being enough for you,” Jonny’s voice cracks when Patrick stretches three fingers into him, finally, so slowly and carefully it hurts him in other ways, “because I used to think I could be, some day.” 

Patrick stretches out over Jonny then, pushing one hand underneath him to touch his chest and hold them close together, Jonny’s back warm and covered. His fingers are still in Jonny, and Jonny’s hips are still rising into it, but it’s instinct and he doesn’t have to think about it, he can concentrate on Patrick’s nose in the short hair at the base of his skull, Patrick’s mouth full and lush when he drags it across the dip between Jonny’s shoulders. 

“You are,” Patrick tells him, and Jonny’s heart seizes up and sinks. He had hope before, and then he lost it all, and now Patrick is trying to give it back to him, and Jonny doesn’t know if there’s a place in him where it will fit, anymore. “I don’t know how you are, but you are. You’re too much for me. You’re so much more than enough. I’m learning to like the pinch and sting of your love. I’m starting to need that, too, because it’s from you and I need everything you can give me. Maybe I don’t live off heartbreak anymore, maybe I live off you.” 

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Jonny growls or shouts or begs or cries, he can’t even tell himself he’s so angry and frightened, but not so much that he can’t reach back to touch the back of Patrick’s head, to get a grip of his so short curls and keep his mouth where he has pressed it to the side of Jonny’s throat, “If you change the way this works, if you change for me, if you make it so you’ll die when I do then I’ll … I’ll kill you myself. I’ll find a way to never die.” 

“Don’t,” Patrick says, and then “Can I? Can -” because Jonny is taking three of his fingers and pushing back for more, now, needing. Jonny nods into his sheets, nods so quickly and definitely that his neck twinges but it doesn’t matter because Patrick takes both his hands and his body heat away, but he pushes into Jonny steadily, careful and gentle until he doesn’t need his hands anymore, can twine his fingers sticky and hot between Jonny’s. “Don’t die. Don’t be human, don’t ever leave this earth. Stay with me. We can be like this forever. Together always.” It’s whispered into the skin behind Jonny’s ear, pressed into him as Patrick makes him take his cock slowly, so slowly Jonny could cry. “Let’s be this. Let’s be us,” Patrick _begs_ , and Jonny has to close his eyes against the sting of the air around them, has to swallow around the sob that rises in his throat. 

Jonny holds onto the hands that Patrick has given him to hold, and he digs his knees into the bed and rises up to take everything Patrick can give him, because he wants it all, and he wants it always. Jonny sweats and Patrick swears and together they come slowly into pleasure that is thick with pain and blindingly bright with potential, hot with intention. 

“I’ll love you forever,” Jonny tells Patrick when he’s still shaking and weak, a mess Patrick has made of him, and he doesn’t know if he means it as an apology or a promise, but Patrick holds him close and tight and breathlessly tells him the same, so however they mean it it is right. 

They lie together for hours afterward, Patrick’s fingers trying in vain to keep his come from dripping out of Jonny until there’s none left in him, his mouth keeping Jonny’s cock wet with everything he can work out of him, Jonny’s hands burning across every tiny dip and smooth expanse of Patrick’s skin and kissing his questions and vows onto Patrick’s tongue. 

Everything has changed, and Jonny is terrified to ask just how much ‘everything’ is now, so they don’t talk about it; they don’t speak at all. They touch one another and they lie, loving one another, until Jonny only has to brush his thumb up under Patrick’s eyelashes to soothe the pain of his love from his body, until it takes bare seconds for Patrick to show Jonny with his body that he can love him, that he doesn’t have to be heartbroken. 

Everything has changed, but they’re together now, and when Patrick tells Jonny he loves him, Jonny finds something new in it, something familiar to take and to keep. Jonny says it back so many times, so many different ways, into so many different places on Patrick’s body and for so many different reasons that it’s more than words, more than Patrick once thought he was confined to, only capable of, and Jonny feels that, he sees Patrick realize it. 

They’re together now and whatever comes next or happens after, they’ll still be together then. 

 

____

 

**love will come through  
(it’s just waiting for you)**

 

Jonny wakes up the next morning with Patrick asleep at his back. When he rolls over, desperate to see every detail of what that looks like, he finds Patrick curled up and scrunching up his face now, unhappy even in sleep that Jonny has moved away and taken his warmth. 

When Patrick finally wakes up, minutes that feel like days later, he blinks slowly until his eyes focus and he sees Jonny next to him, awake already and looking at him. 

“Creeeeeeeep,” he says under his breath, but he closes his eyes again and reaches for Jonny, and when his hand finds his hip in the sheets the touch makes something new bloom in Jonny; something very dark and a little bit heavy, blundering in a big way, but something that is trying for the very first time to be different, and eager to learn, pleased to be at home in Jonny. 

That’s the first time Jonny feels Patrick’s love, changed in him because of Jonny, and changed to be something Jonny can feel. 

They nap for a little while longer and when they wake up again together, they are in love. 

 

____

 

**but I saw the two collide**

 

Their schedule affords them two days on which they can skip optional skates, so practices are all they have to worry about in the face of making themselves at home with one another. 

And worry about it they must. 

They each react in different ways, encounter different difficulties in getting comfortable with what they’ve done and what they have become with one another. 

Jonny mellows so much that his teammates claim they barely recognize him. He is still terrified of what his future with Patrick might look like, but he has no more control over that now than he ever did before, and besides, it can’t matter all that much when he has Patrick now and for as long as they can see to it that they can stay together. It’s strange, and it’s frightening, but he still loved Patrick when everything else fell apart, when he thought he’d lost him forever, so the knowledge that he can and does have him now makes every other fear pale in comparison. Jonny is happier than he’d ever hoped he could be, and it makes him a little bit lazy for the first time in his life, secure in what matters so the smaller things don’t have to be how he shores himself up against failure anymore. He’s never been as serious as some people might like to say he is, he’s always known how and when to have fun, but now he laughs so hard at terrible jokes that Shawzy looks at him like he has just announced he’s switching his position to goal. He shares in the pure, unadulterated glee that Sharpy takes in fucking with him, and he’s pleased as punch to be the butt of any joke he can find his way into the middle of, so happy to be around his guys knowing that he and Patrick will be here, side by side and hand in hand, for a very long time to come. He plays hockey like he did when he was a teenager - taking the good kind of chances and chasing pucks with abandon, because he knows now he has nothing to fear losing. 

He watches Patrick mess around with increasingly ridiculous and impossible shootout moves and turns to Saader and says “You find that hot too, right? I know I’ve always been a goner, but please tell me there aren’t people who can watch him be like that and remain totally unaffected, because I don’t know how to live in a world populated with people like that.” 

“Kaner finally let Jonny sniff his cup, that’s why he’s … like this,” Saader announces to the locker room at large after taking one look at him before they all head back to hit the showers, gesturing at the length of Jonny’s body with a lazy hand wave, and there’s a stunned silence that lasts about four seconds before people are laughing and yelling and clapping Jonny on the back, congratulating him like he just had a ten point game. 

“You break it in, you bought it,” Sharpy tells Patrick solemnly, and Jonny flushes, finding the space in himself among the happiness packed tight all through him to be just slightly embarrassed that his crush was this obvious, that his pining had been this clear the entire time. He wants Patrick to know that he’s super easy for him, but he’s not sure he’s okay with the whole team knowing it too. At least, he’s not sure until Patrick neatly knocks Sharpy’s hand off his shoulder, looks right at Jonny with an expression that hits him like a heat wave from across the room, and says “Don’t worry, I have no intention of ever returning him.” 

Patrick’s struggles in dealing with the changes that being in love with Jonny mean for him mostly amount to trying his very hardest to listen and understand when Jonny repeatedly explains to him that they’re still hockey players and they still have jobs to do. Patrick isn’t exactly advocating instant retirement, but he is finding himself vexed by the time that their profession eats up; time he seems to think there’s a much better use for, now. 

“I haven’t touched you in hours,” he whines into Jonny’s collarbones when he pushes him up against the wall in a mercifully secluded corner of the showers that afternoon, even though Jonny’s confident now that precisely none of their teammates would be surprised to walk in on Patrick feeling him up through his towel. Horrified and traumatized for sure, but not surprised.

“We were kinda busy,” Jonny tries to argue, but it’s a losing game because Patrick has hands, and Patrick is using those hands to touch Jonny. 

“Says the man who routinely thinks about blowing me during games,” Patrick interjects, amused, and it’s maybe with spite that Jonny focuses on loving him as much as he can, right then, and that’s a considerable amount these days. Patrick’s eyes go unfocused for a moment, and the smirk starts to slip from his face, but only for a second, and then he’s grinning at Jonny, bright and joyous. “Ha! That barely hurt at all! Sorry about your life, Toews, but I can handle everything you throw at me, now.” 

“Oh we’ll see about that,” Jonny says, dragging Patrick out of the showers and hustling him into his clothes so he can take him home and take him apart. 

They don’t make it more than two feet from the front door and they still have their coats on when Jonny goes to his knees and sucks Patrick off until he’s pulling at Jonny’s hair painfully and swearing in a language Jonny has never heard before. Patrick picks Jonny up, which is a newfound discovery of Patrick’s abilities that is maybe Jonny’s favourite, and carries him away to his bed where he lets Jonny make him come on his cock twice before he makes Jonny roll over and licks into him with an enthusiasm that makes him see stars. 

“We need to talk to Q about making practices shorter,” Jonny concedes, still trying to catch his breath and wondering if there will ever come a time when touching Patrick doesn’t make him feel like he’s a lesser person when he isn’t. 

“You can take that one, everyone knows you’re his favourite,” Patrick laughs, and Jonny knows he’ll never get over the way his heart feels too big and too full for his body when he looks at Patrick like this - naked and smiling, sated and happy to share every second and inch of that with Jonny. 

“You’re _my_ favourite,” Jonny tells Patrick dumbly, feeling like his face must be split wide and slack with the way Patrick knocks him out. 

“And you’re mine,” Patrick indulges him, because maybe he’s hundreds of years old and maybe he’s not even human, but Jonny still found a way to be his undoing, too. 

 

____

 

**lust in favour.  
(you can win)**

 

Tragically, eventually they do have to get back to their day jobs with something that’s hopefully close enough to their usual level of focus and concentration. 

The Coyotes come to visit, but not for long, and not with much fight, nothing at all that can stack up against Jonny and Patrick and the way they play like they’ve got nothing to prove to anyone but themselves, and everything in this world and every other world besides to prove there, to one another. For one another. 

Patrick is still stuck on the second line with a rotating cast of linemates who can’t keep up, and that has nothing to do with Patrick’s nature, only his learned, earned skill. 

Jonny nets a timely, beautiful goal to put them ahead at the end of the first, and he rewards himself by slipping his hand into Patrick’s onto the bench once Patrick comes off his own shift, adding his own goal to the tally because neither their relationship nor anything else in the known universe affects their competitive nature with one another. 

“If you can manage to get more points than me I’ll fuck you up against any wall of your choosing in reward,” Patrick goads him, grinning knowingly, because maybe Jonny isn’t very good at hiding just how much he loves Patrick’s inhuman strength and the gains it promises for them. 

Jonny scores his second hat trick in less than a month, and adds a couple of assists to round out what is ultimately a five point night for him, a four point night for Patrick even though his goals are nicer, cleaner than Jonny’s and mostly unassisted. 

Patrick doesn’t break a sweat, holding Jonny up against the floor length windows in his living room, never once dropping the pace or mincing his words when he tells Jonny how nicely he takes it, how proud the people of Chicago would be to see their captain open up for him so well. 

Jonny comes between them copiously and untouched, quicker than he has in years, and Patrick laughs darkly delighted in his ear when he gets him back on his feet and spins him around, pushes back into him with Jonny naked and still sticky with his own come, making a mess against the glass and pressing his cheek into it, watching the way their matching sweaty handprints fade away but appear again in an instant, clear and starkly bright against the pitch black night outside, constantly renewed evidence that they were here and they were here together. 

The next morning Patrick cleans the window himself, to save his cleaner that trauma. He leaves one set of handprints, one small spot near the frame where their touches overlapped, Jonny’s hand bigger than Patrick’s. It’s still there that night, and the night after, and the night after that. 

 

____

 

**all the riches one man can claim**

 

Jonny finds his way out of his love-fuelled sex haze when David calls him to check in “Seen as how you haven’t called or emailed in like a week. Are you trying to hide another concussion? Did you knock someone up? Because mom would be so stoked, you know how badly she wants grandkids, she’d -” 

“For fuck’s sake, David, no one is having a baby and I’m not hurt. I’m …” How the fuck is he supposed to explain any of this to his brother? It’s a sobering thought. “I … uh … well … Patrick and I -” 

Jonny needn’t have worried, because that’s all he has to say before David interrupts 

“Ohhhh. Okay. All you had to do was send out a group text, man. ‘Can’t talk, finally banging the love of my life. ps - Did you see his latest sick spin-o-rama? Sucks to be all of you, but not me, because I’m hitting that.’ How difficult would that have been, bro?” 

“Is there anyone who _didn’t_ know I was in love with him this entire time?” 

“Oh my god. Oh my god! You -- please tell me you actually thought you were being subtle about this, man. Please. Oh god, can I patch mom into this call? Please can I? I - oh my _god_ , that is fucking priceless, I -” 

Jonny hangs up on his brother, because his brother deserves it. And then he texts his brother to apologize, because his mother raised him right. 

_Sorry_ is all he says, because he has no idea how to say ‘Sorry, it’s just that Patrick isn’t just my boyfriend now, we’re kind of forever, and also he’s a demon. Tell mom to expect us home for Christmas, we’ll bring the pudding!’ 

_Me too_ David replies, because he’s a good brother, and then _I didn’t mean to make fun, I’m happy you’re happy. Always knew it would be Pat_ because he’s a good friend too. Of course, he has to round it out with _please as my brother dont let mom make you guys share a room at Christmas, bcause my room is right next 2 yours and he looks like a screamer_ because he’s also a horrible little jerk. 

_Fuck off_ Jonny’s fingers tap out before he even really thinks about it, and then _I am happy, though. Really happy_ when he does. 

 

____

 

**we could make forever feel this way  
(oh don’t you wanna stay?)**

 

After Phoenix they’re facing down a solid day on - day off schedule that will last for well over a week and see them troop through a seemingly neverending parade of cities spread across the US and Canada. Making what they have now work on such a long trip will be something of a baptism by fire for what Crow calls ‘taking their love on tour’. 

 

____

 

Nashville is a pre-roadtrip roadtrip game, and it is there and then that Patrick decides that this separate rooms thing is total bullshit. 

“If you think so too, I mean. If you need your space or whatever, I get that. You focus on the game in a way I don’t have to, so if you need me to take a step back for you, I can do that.” He has become increasingly and yet not outwardly noticeably more nervous around Jonny, second guessing himself on decisions that he’d have made for the both of them without pause or qualm when they were friends, before Jonny knew what he was. Now that everything is out in the open he’s taking the time to re-find his footing in space that they suddenly share, and checking in with Jonny on that every single step of the way. 

“I love you,” Jonny tells him, pulling him forward by the strap of his bag and kissing him right there on the plane because they’re the last off of it, and the flight crew are too busy packing up to give them a second glance. “You know that, right?” 

“Of course I know. You’ve been torturing yourself with it for years,” Patrick says, kissing Jonny once more and quickly before he turns him around and gently shoves him to get him moving. “But this is something else now that neither of us are getting hurt. We’re paving the way in human-demon soulmates, we’re blazing a trail here, Jonathan, and we’re in that together, so don’t think you can make me shoulder the brunt of this the way you do with your hockey team’s success.” 

“Remind me again who’s leading the team in points right now?” Jonny asks him, and Patrick rolls his eyes. 

“We’re in love now, I have to let you win some things,” Patrick tries, but Jonny has his number. 

“You’d never _let_ me win at anything,” he’s entirely confident, and sure enough Patrick scowls and sighs and wraps his arms around Jonny from behind. This makes it almost completely impossible for them to walk across the runway to the airport, and there’s always the chance that someone could see, but their teammates wordlessly bunch up to hide them away in their midst, and Jonny probably wouldn’t have made a single move to shrug him off anyway. 

“No, and you know that as well as I know that you love me with everything that you are,” Patrick says with conviction, and Jonny hides his smile down underneath the scarf that’s wrapped around his neck because he needs to maintain some semblance of being unaffected by Patrick, here. For the sake of decorum, he has to try at least. It’s the only thing he can think of that he’s ever been totally pleased to tank at. 

 

____

 

They’re back home for all of five minutes before their first real roadtrip of the season begins in earnest and they head out to take on Colorado. 

It’s only when he has finished unpacking in Patrick’s room that Jonny realizes he never really answered Patrick or finished the conversation he started about this. 

“I appreciate the offer of space, and maybe I’ll have to take you up on it one day, but right now it’s the last thing I want. Unless … if you brought it up because you need space I can --” 

Patrick stops him with a hand on his wrist. 

“One perk of being older than time is that I know myself and my needs pretty well. I’d do well to have you within reach for every minute of every single day, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel the same way. This is new for you, and I think it would be a good idea if you were to take some time to really … ease into it.” 

“But this is … what we have is new for you too, right? You said you hadn’t -” 

Patrick takes Jonny’s other wrist in hand and stills Jonny completely. He hadn’t even noticed he’d dropped the pair of socks he’d been holding and been about to stand up, but he feels in the contrast between his skin and Patrick’s how he’s gone cold all over in an instant. 

“I haven’t, Jonny. Not like this. Not in any way that matters. Not for centuries. And never again, after you.” Jonny hates to hear him talk about what might happen in his life after Jonny has left it, but he could stand to hear Patrick saying he’s essentially it for him a couple million times, he thinks. 

“So how can you know what you want and need, then? If this is new for you too? You were the one who decided separate rooms were the worst idea ever all of two days ago.” 

“Because I know me better than you’ll ever know you, and because I have a very, very different relationship with time. I know what I want, and I know how I want to spend my time. You need to be careful with yours. You need to make sure that you’re spending it in ways you find rewarding, and I won’t be responsible for anything you come to think a mistake. I’ve never had to think about anyone else’s needs, but now I need to think about yours. I know what I want, but I’m learning how to check in with you, too. You’ll forgive me if centuries of habit take me a week or two to break.” 

“Yeah well … I’m not going back to my own room,” Jonny says, stubborn and sullen, and Patrick laughs at his pout, but then kisses it squarely. 

“I’m not asking you to,” Patrick lulls him into a false sense of having gotten his way by making out with him until Jonny is pressed into his pillows and desperate, shirtless and still driven just as far out of his mind by everything Patrick does to him as he’d been that first time, days and lifetimes ago now, “but tomorrow you should. Just to make sure that with me is where you want to be.” 

 

____

 

And so when they make their second trip of the season and their careers back to Winnipeg, Patrick and Jonny have dinner with Jonny’s parents, beat the Jets again against a chorus of boos every time Jonny touches the puck, and then go back to their hotel prepared to go their separate ways. 

“This is stupid,” Jonny says, because Patrick will let Jonny push him up against his hotel room door and work his hands down into his boxers, will let him kiss him until his lips and tongue are tingling with it, but refuses to let Jonny into his room. “All my stuff is in my room like you wanted, it’s not even like we’re sharing your room, just having a sleepover.” 

“Nope, no sleepovers tonight,” Patrick is steadfast, and Jonny isn’t happy. 

“This is stupid,” Jonny says, once more with feeling, but he does as Patrick has suggested and keeps going until he reaches his hotel room, four doors down. He’ll show Patrick, he thinks. He’ll spend the entire night in his own room, without Patrick, even though it’s been habit to hang out together for years now. He won’t call or text, he won’t even miss him, and tomorrow Patrick will be begging him to room with him again. That sounds like just desserts to Jonny. 

He calls Patrick thirty three minutes later. 

“This is so stupid. I’m so bored. Why am I sitting here, bored and missing you, when you’re like fifty feet away from me?” 

“This is not stupid, it’s an exercise in patience, Jonathan. How are we to truly know that our time spent together is as rewarding as we think it is if we have no experience with the alternative?” 

“The alternative is stupid,” is Jonny’s immediate and confident answer to this question, and he doesn’t appreciate the fondness in Patrick’s laughter. 

“This is good, Jonny. We can rest up and be fresh for the game tomorrow. That used to be a priority to you, remember how you used to lecture me about how I needed to go to bed earlier?” 

“You haven’t made me irresponsible, Patrick,” Jonny protests, “I’m playing the best hockey I’ve ever played in my career, I’m no less focused because we’re together now.” 

“So why does it matter that we’re spending our nights apart? If I’m not affecting your focus why are you calling to whimper at me about how bored you are without me?” 

Jonny sighs. This is tedious, and it’s almost enough to make him not miss Patrick anymore, which is to say nothing will ever be enough to make him not miss Patrick when he isn’t right beside him. Jonathan Toews is a big believer in excess of riches. 

“Because. Even before I knew you were the way you were, before we got together, the only reason I wouldn’t be calling you to complain about your stupid absence would be that you’d be here already, or I’d be there. We didn’t spend any of our free time not together before, so why in the hell should we start now?” 

“Because,” Patrick parrots, “we’re different now. We’re saying something different with our allocation of time and personal space, Jonny. To ourselves and to one another; to everyone around us. To the world at large. This is such a huge deal, you and me. And not just for us. You need to be sure, Jonny.” 

“Are you sure?” Jonny asks, and he isn’t afraid of the answer to that question, but he’s a little bit scared in general when he registers the weight of this moment, the true span of what they’re doing here. 

“Yes, but you don’t have to be, not yet, you can -” 

“I’m sure, Patrick. I’m _sure_ ,” Jonny says, because he is. They are. 

The moments that follow are filled with silence broken only by the quiet rush of their breathing, and Jonny doesn’t mind waiting because he doesn’t have to do so alone. 

“Okay, we can nix this whole separate rooms thing tomorrow night,” Patrick relents finally, softly and without defeat. 

“Why not right now?” Jonny persists, because when it comes to Patrick his eyes are never anywhere but right on the prize. Unless they’re closed because the prize is making a mess of Jonny. 

“Because I’m not having fucking Kesler chirp me about how I’m limping on the ice on Saturday, and if I see you tonight I won’t get off your cock until you have to beg me to,” Patrick says, like this is a thing he can just say to Jonny, like it’s somehow reasonable to deliver this kind of sentiment in no less than a perfectly straightforward tone of voice. Like it’s fact. 

“Oh,” Jonny says, struck dumb yet again. “Okay. Um. Uh. I uh … I understand? But for arguments sake, could you maybe just tell me what you’re wearing before you hang -” 

Patrick hangs up without telling him, but Jonny had expected as much and besides - he doesn’t actually need to know. When he pictures Patrick he’s only ever wearing a jersey with Jonny’s name and number on it or nothing at all. 

 

____

 

In Vancouver, Patrick holds Jonny open and uses his tongue to take him to pieces. He puts him back together with shower makeouts and by letting Jonny sleep with his wet hair on his pillow, and no one is limping when they take the ice, but Jonny is decidedly starry-eyed and slack-jawed when some unholy force in the universe sees fit to award Patrick a penalty shot right there in front of Jonny and the whole world. It’s awful and it’s absolutely inappropriate, is what it is, and the fact that Patrick scores barely even registers for Jonny until Patrick kindly reminds him. 

Repeatedly. 

And with helpful demonstration. 

 

____

 

By the time they make it into Edmonton winter has well and truly set in, and the city is a strange contradiction of bright, bright light and cold, thickly dark night. 

Patrick and Jonny don’t stay long, but while they’re there they are the exception, they are what does not belong. 

They fit together seamlessly, perfectly, but they stand out in ways that Jonny can feel, now. They are different in ways that even Patrick can’t begin to account for. 

They are warm blooded and stirred, full of feeling. They come and they go, winning along the way, but they pause; they do not stop and they could never belong. Not here. Not in this weather. Not only in this world. 

 

____

 

In Calgary they make up for ground that they’d lost to the Flames last time, and Dallas and Phoenix blur into one place, a few hours of hockey that yield challenge but no real competition. 

Not in the form of hockey teams, at least. 

Opposing players, on the other hand, become an issue. 

Jonny had forgotten that Seguin plays in Dallas now because he does his very best to forget that Seguin plays or exists anywhere at all. 

Patrick, unfortunately, makes no such noble effort. 

“This guy,” Seguin says with his arm slung around Patrick’s neck, with his hand on the round of Patrick’s shoulder “was a hellraiser in Biel. He put _me_ to shame, man.” 

Jonny just loves hearing tales from the winter of Patrick’s discontent, he has all the time in the world to reminisce about what was for him the lost half season of misery, angst and pining. 

“Tell me more,” Jonny says, so low and deadpan that Patrick gasps, delighted. 

“Eeeesh,” Seguin winces dramatically, because he seems to do everything dramatically, but he also takes his hands off Patrick and raises them in a ‘I mean no harm’ gesture that definitely mollifies Jonny. So much so that he’s able to stay for almost an entire second drink before he makes a break for it, hating to leave Patrick anywhere with anyone at all who isn’t him, but hating to leave him with Seguin exponentially more. If it didn’t make him sick to his stomach to sit there and seethe with jealousy that he knows isn’t even rational, he’d stay and make himself sit through that as punishment for his own idiocy.

“You’re an idiot,” is the first thing Patrick says when he comes to find Jonny in the room they’re sharing, barely an hour later. 

Jonny can only nod glumly, in total agreement. 

“You were seriously jealous of him” Patrick says much more softly, in something like veneration. He’s across the room and wrapped around Jonny in much, much less time than getting there should take. “Seeing him touch me made you crazy, I could feel it, I could taste it on you. You were vibrating in your skin when he put his hand on my thigh.” 

Fucking duh. 

“Obviously,” Jonny admits, not sure whether he should be apologizing yet or not. “He’s all … Seguin, and he had you all to himself last winter. He had you when I didn’t, and he still thinks he can touch you like you’re his, and you’re not his, you’re not, you’re-” 

“I’m yours,” Patrick says, or rather kisses into his mouth, really. “And you are mine.” 

“Fucking duh,” Jonny says, and Patrick finds the time to laugh, but doesn’t let it slow him down in his mission to get Jonny more naked than a mere lack of clothes could allow him to be. Nothing could distract Patrick from that, because he makes Jonny feel naked when he’s fully dressed, makes him feel intimately, privately loved when they’re in a stadium packed full of people, with more cameras trained on them than both of them could count. 

“But jealousy is a really, really nice look on you. So sweet on my tongue.” Patrick is one to talk with his fingers thick and lovely, sweet with salt in Jonny’s mouth. 

“Oh yeah? We’ll see how you do the next time we make a pit stop in St. Louis,” Jonny says when he pulls off with a slick pop, “because unlike you and Seguin, Osh and I -” 

“Let me stop you right there,” Patrick says, eyes so deep and full that Jonny could get lost if he wasn’t already, “and let me say for the record here and now that I can and I will kill that tool.” 

This is hardly the first time Patrick has made such a threat, but it’s the first time he’s said it when Jonny had cause to know he wasn’t joking. Jonny laughs, the sound a little rusty around the mechanics, because he knows Patrick wouldn’t really ever hurt anyone, and yet something inside him likes knowing that he could; that he might. That he would kill for Jonny. 

“You don’t have to literally kill off the competition, Kaner.” 

“He is not competition,” Patrick insists, and Jonny is twistedly thrilled to see some shadow of doubt in him when he does, “because no one is, in any world I can get to.” 

Maybe Jonny can’t say the same, but he knows without doubt that Patrick would find a way to get to him wherever he was, he trusts Patrick to find him and keep him wherever he could be. 

“I’ll hold you to that in every single world there is,” Jonny promises, and Patrick blows raspberries on Jonny’s ribs until he’s laughing too hard to keep talking about how they were destined to be together - made for each other so far outside of peace and compliance; born as different kinds of people in very different kinds of times, and still a more than perfect fit. 

____

 

**all I’d want is you.**

 

After a lengthy but successful roadtrip, they arrive back home with two days before their next game. 

“So see you losers in two days,” Shawzy says when they’re standing around on the tarmac, waiting to cross the runway into the terminal. 

“Uh, we have practice tomorrow? And the day after that?” Jonny reminds him, wondering for a moment if he’s slipping up in his leaderly duty until he remembers those duties don’t extend to keeping his teammates informed of their schedule. He’s their captain, not their truant officer. 

“Sure,” Shawzy shrugs, “but Kaner looks like he’s honest to god struggling not to maul you right here and now, and you’re not getting out of that walking for at least forty eight hours, I’d wager.” 

“I’ll take that bet,” Hossa says, appearing over Shawzy’s shoulder and waving his wallet in the air, “fifty dollars says they only show up right before the game, far more warmed up than the rest of us.” 

Jonny turns to Patrick with a totally incredulous expression already ready to go, thinking he’ll say something like ‘Can you believe these idiots? Let’s get them all traded. Or make them think we could, at least,’ but he’s stopped in his tracks when he looks around and finds Patrick staring at him openly wanting, chewing on his own bottom lip and looking for all the world like if he concentrates hard enough, he’ll be able to kiss Jonny just by looking at him. Jonny wouldn’t be surprised, because where there’s a preternatural will there has to be a way, but he’d really rather not find out what that way is in front of their teammates _and_ in public. 

“Jesus christ. Are you -- can you keep it in your pants until we get home, at least?” 

Patrick considers the question, licking at the side of his own mouth with a quick flash of tongue, and Jonny is probably going to owe Hossa fifty dollars the next time he sees him. If this becomes a thing, Jonny might have to look into getting a second job. 

“The car?” Jonny hedges, glaring at the luggage truck blocking their pathway as if to move it by his sheer will to get it out of his way. When it instantly starts moving, Jonny wouldn’t swear that he’s not responsible, somehow. 

“Probably?” Patrick wagers, at least a little apologetic about it, but he really has no need to be. 

Jonny has precisely zero desire to stand around here yelling at his teammates for their wildly inappropriate level of interest in his sex life, because he has places to be and things to do. 

Banging his best friend encompasses the entire list. 

 

____

 

**i’ll pay for you  
( anytime ) **

 

They don’t make it to practice on Monday, but they manage to drag themselves out of bed and out of one another’s arms for long enough to play hockey for several hours on Tuesday. It's a miracle in among days littered with the miraculous, but Jonny has to give Hossa back the fifty dollars he wins from him and fifty more when they double down on whether or not Patrick will ever answer Bollig's badgering him with the question of who tops in their bedroom. Because everyone is apparently dying to know, and Jonny (wrongly) thinks Patrick would get the most glee out of watching them suffer.

“We switch, obviously,” Patrick tells the locker room after practice, and Jonny's cheeks burn, “you've seen his ass, and maybe you haven't seen his dick when it's hard and dripping, but if you had you'd be asking nicely for it, too,” Patrick continues with no hint of shame or remorse, and every drop of love for him in Jonny's body glows bright with delight.

Hossa is the last person left in the locker room besides them, and Jonny hands him his wallet and all of its contents to get rid of him.

 

____

 

**we go together or we don’t go down at all.  
(hearts on fire tonight; love feels like war)**

 

The next time they play Dallas it’s in Chicago, and Jonny takes a puck to the jaw. 

It cuts his skin open almost to the bone, and he bleeds profusely all over the ice and all over the bench, even while Patrick yells at him. 

“Stop that! Stop that right now! Stop bleeding!” Patrick shouts, thunderously angry, and Jonny rolls his eyes and uses the hand that isn’t holding a hunk of gauze to his face to pat Patrick on the knee. 

“I’m fine, Kaner. It’s just a little blood. Nothing broken, barely even bruised. I’m not missing a shift, I’ll be fine, you’ll see.” 

“I’d fucking better,” Patrick tells me, turning his murderous gaze back out onto the ice, which is both a relief and the furthest thing from it. 

“Hey so remember we had that talk about how you can’t murder people over me?” Jonny whispers insistently, and Patrick’s eyes narrow like he’s furious at Jonny for remembering that conversation. 

“Yes,” he says from between gritted teeth, sullen and still looking about as far from human as Jonny has ever seen him. He looks ferocious and he looks like a Patrick Jonny knows now, and he is beautiful. 

“C’mon, let’s go say it with pucks instead,” Jonny tempts, and Patrick bites. 

They win the game by an obscene margin, and Jonny has to wear a small bandage on his face for two weeks after, and for absolutely no reason, because that night Patrick takes him home and very literally kisses it all better. 

 

____

 

**how long will I want you?  
( as long as you want me ) **

 

One morning not long after, Jonny wakes to find that Patrick has awoken before him. He’s sitting up in their bed, his hair still wrecked the way it always is in the morning, like he slept through storms instead of safe and warm right next to Jonny. Jonny has, in his sleep, wriggled close to lie with his head pillowed on Patrick’s thigh, and Patrick isn’t reading or playing with his phone or nudging Jonny to get off of him so he can go make them breakfast, he’s simply sitting with one hand resting lightly on Jonny’s neck, watching him wake up. 

“How would you feel about making this arrangement more permanent?” Patrick asks before Jonny has even blinked the sleep off his eyelashes, so he can’t do anything much more athletic than turn to look up at Patrick, craning his neck to see his face. His heart, however, beats wildly. 

“You mean like … get married?” 

Patrick’s face doesn’t change, he doesn’t laugh or frown. He just lifts his hand to drag it slowly through Jonny’s hair and stays watching him, thoughtful and considering. Solemn. 

“I mean like … get human. In my case.” 

“Oh,” Jonny says, because there’s nothing else he could say. He’s thought about it. He’s thought a thousand times of growing old with Patrick; he’s thought about it knowing that Patrick isn’t human and knowing no such thing. “That could work.” 

“Or,” he says, taking a chance and a risk and hanging off of a limb by the skin of his teeth, “How would you feel about not doing that?” 

Patrick frowns then, and his eyes shine, sleek with the beginnings of tears. 

“I’ve lived for long enough, Jonny. I don’t want to keep living after I’ve loved you. There will be nothing for me when you’re gone.” 

“I know,” Jonny says, reaching to thumb up over Patrick’s cheekbones and dry beneath his eyes. Patrick tilts his head at him the very same way he had the first time he’d looked at Jonny as something, someone else. Somehow more for Jonny to love. 

“But how would you feel about a forever we could spend together?” 

 

 

**[ and longer by far ]**

 

____  
____  
____

**Author's Note:**

> In terms of canon all the present and future games I mention are accurately detailed, but I can't know the score of games that haven't taken place yet and I'm very sorry about that.
> 
> As per, this is a rough scaffolding of truth and scheduling accuracy that I have lovingly and liberally adorned with nonsense and a lot of hypothetical feelings. It's just that this time there's also bonus demons.


End file.
